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Storykeeper

Name: Storykeeper
Author: Daniel A. Smith
ISBN: 978-1-4662-1297-8

by Daniel A. Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 8, 2012

A vivid, slowly unfolding epic of disaster and survival in 16th-century America.

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A novel delivers stark tales from storytellers who chronicle a vanished Arkansas tribe.

In the year Europeans called 1541, Taninto’s childhood is destroyed when a band of strangers cross the Mizzissibizzibbippi with weapons “that smoked like burning leaves and roared like thunder.” The Spanish conquistadors and their arquebuses cause chaos (this was an enemy who “killed without concern or hesitation, without ritual or purpose”), but the wave of diseases that follows wreaks even greater damage on the nations of the Nine-Rivers Valley. In his debut novel, Smith imagines a series of storytellers who evoke one another in their tales and, in doing so, describe the century that saw the last of 12 interconnected tribes, from the splendor of the temple city of Casqui to the “old and tired” land to which its survivors must retreat. Many years after the calamity, Manaha fights to relate her memories to a village that fears those recollections “will only bring the sickness again.” The stories she tells recount the life of the lost Palisema girl Nanza who—sick with smallpox and left for dead—finds herself rescued by an aged Taninto. In alternating chapters, three narratives unwind: the conquest Taninto witnesses, the flight Nanza endures, and the remembrances Manaha struggles to share. In the process, the history of a nearly forgotten people is imagined, or reimagined. Smith (The Great Turtle and the White Bird, 2013) writes fluidly, and the society he depicts is intriguingly complex. While some readers may wish for more direct evocation of the sensory details of that world (more smells, tastes, and sounds), others will be grateful for the short glimpse they’ve been given into a culture until now kept solely in the prison of the past. “A man without a story is one without a past,” Smith writes, “and a man without a past is one without wisdom.” By the time readers have wandered freely through the strange realm of the Storykeeper, they may well find those words more prophetic, and more powerful.

A vivid, slowly unfolding epic of disaster and survival in 16th-century America.

Pub Date: March 8, 2012

ISBN: 978-1-4662-1297-8

Page Count: 352

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION

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THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH

by Ken Follett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 7, 1989

It's all quite entertaining and memorable.

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Here, Follett sets the thrillers aside for a long, steady story about building a cathedral in 12th-century England.

Bloodthirsty or adventure-crazed Follett readers will be frustrated, but anyone who has ever been moved by the splendors of a fine church will sink right into this highly detailed but fast-moving historical work—a novel about the people and skills needed to put up an eye-popping cathedral in the very unsettled days just before the ascension of Henry II. The cathedral is the brainchild of Philip, prior of the monastery at Kingsbridge, and Tom, an itinerant master mason. Philip, shrewd and ambitious but genuinely devout, sees it as a sign of divine agreement when his decrepit old cathedral burns on the night that Tom and his starving family show up seeking shelter. Actually, it's Tom's clever stepson Jack who has stepped in to carry out God's will by secretly torching the cathedral attic, but the effect is the same. Tom gets the commission to start the rebuilding—which is what he has wanted to do more than anything in his life. Meanwhile, however, the work is complicated greatly by local politics. There is a loathsome baron and his family who have usurped the local earldom and allied themselves with the powerful, cynical bishop—who is himself sinfully jealous of Philip's cathedral. There are the dispossessed heirs to earldom, a beautiful girl and her bellicose brother, both sworn to root out the usurpers. And there is the mysterious Ellen, Tom's second wife, who witnessed an ancient treachery that haunts the bishop, the priory, and the vile would-be earl. The great work is set back, and Tom is killed in a raid by the rivals. It falls to young Jack to finish the work. Thriller writing turns out to be pretty good training, since Follett's history moves like a fast freight train. Details are plenty, but they support rather than smother.

It's all quite entertaining and memorable.

Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1989

ISBN: 0451225244

Page Count: 973

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1989

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | LITERARY FICTION

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by Ken Follett

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by Ken Follett

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NEVER
by Ken Follett

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Epix Announces Follett, Cornwell Adaptations

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A FALL OF MARIGOLDS

by Susan Meissner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 4, 2014

Touching and inspirational.

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A scarf ties together the stories of two women as they struggle with personal journeys 100 years apart in Meissner’s historical novel (The Girl in the Glass, 2012, etc.).

In 1911, Clara Wood witnesses the traumatic death of the man she loves in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and chooses to bury her grief and guilt while ministering to sick immigrants on Ellis Island. The hospital’s remote and insulated from the rest of New York City, and she refuses travel to the mainland, even on her days off. Then an emigrant Welshman wrapped in his deceased wife’s distinctive marigold scarf arrives, and Clara finds herself reaching beyond her normal duties to help the quarantined man. The truths she uncovers about his wife trigger reflections about ethical decisions and compel her to examine her own convictions about life and a person’s capacity to love, as a colleague tries to help her. Gently interwoven into Clara’s tale is the story of widow Taryn Michaels, whose life 100 years later in some ways parallels Clara’s. Taryn works in a tony fabric shop, raises her daughter in the apartment above and does her best to avoid the overwhelming emotions she’s felt since she stood across the street from the World Trade Center and witnessed the destruction as the first tower crumbled. A recently discovered photo from that day is published in a national magazine and now, 10 years after 9/11, Taryn is forced to relive the events and face the guilt she’s harbored because she acceded to a customer’s request and stopped by a hotel to pick up a marigold scarf, an action that delayed Taryn from joining her husband at Windows on the World for a celebration she’d planned. Meissner is a practiced writer whose two main characters cope with universal themes that many people deal with: loss, survivor’s guilt, and permitting oneself to move on and achieve happiness again. Although their stories are unbalanced—Clara’s account dominates the narrative—the author creates two sympathetic, relatable characters that readers will applaud.

Touching and inspirational.