A stylized picaresque about an outlaw at the limits of his imagination.
A cowboy attempts to return home in Uebbing’s surreal Western novel.
Henry Dunn is tired of the cowboy life, with its “quick fixes and reckless wanderings.” He’s ready to hang up his guns and head home to Kansas, where his childhood sweetheart Angie Sherman is waiting for him. “She was like a song stuck in his head that kept playing louder with all the anger of all the years and distance growing between them,” he muses, seated at a bar in Stricland, Oregon. A duel with the town’s corrupt sheriff leaves Dunn with a bullet in his gut. He heads vaguely east, pursued by the dead sheriff’s son, deputy Bruce “Bucktooth” Miller, and a posse of Stricland lawmen. In Las Vegas, Bucktooth kills a sex worker, whose orphaned son—a boy known as the Kid—soon becomes Dunn’s sidekick. The two embark on a journey of not-too-terrible crime and occasional violence, encountering all manner of scoundrels, squares, and bohemians along the way. The cowboy continues to make his way to Kansas and Angie, whose financial difficulties he promises to solve—though by this point, his quick fixes and reckless wanderings have made him mostly useless for the kind of life he desires. Uebbing’s prose is laden with both romance and irony, capturing the wistful roguishness of his characters’ worldviews: “They sped on, through one tiny ramshackle desert town after another and the next and off the back into the raw desert. Through the red rocks, they drove on and on without talking, the kid watching the road fly by. He smoked a candy cigarette now that he’d lifted from the station.” The larger plot is secondary to the imagery and incidents, which routinely spur the reader to question the story’s reality. (Even the time period is slippery, variously evoking the turn of the last century, the Great Depression, and the 1970s.) Over before it overstays its welcome, the novel searches for meaning in the mythical landscapes of the American 20th century.
A stylized picaresque about an outlaw at the limits of his imagination.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2008
ISBN: 9781934759134
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Robert Reed Publishers
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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