A vivid, compelling portrayal of the heartbreaking price exacted for freedom.
A fledgling abolitionist, Mary Willis turns her family’s farm into a stop on the Underground Railroad, but the arrival of Joe Bell endangers everything she holds dear.
Joe is on the run from a plantation in Walnut Grove, West Virginia. His master is a temperate man, letting Joe keep some of the money he earns doing expert work at other people's sawmills, and gentle with Joe’s younger sister, Alaura. But Joshua Bell’s son, Yates, is a hotheaded, jealous, dissipated man eager to take control of his father’s estate. Desperate for money, Yates attacks Joe, stealing the money he had saved to buy Alaura’s freedom. Joe flees, moving along the stations of the Underground Railroad, until a harrowing encounter with a bounty hunter leaves him with a vicious dog bite and a mortal enemy: Karl Wilhelm. He ends up in Mary’s barn, starving and broken. The dog bite forces the local doctor, a sympathetic Quaker, to amputate his leg, and Joe must stay with the Willises as he recuperates, distraught over Alaura’s fate and doubting that he’ll ever make it to Canada. Meanwhile, Yates has sold off Alaura. Leander, Mary’s brother, is sent to Buffalo to advance their father’s lumber business, but he falls into the clutches of Isabel, a wealthy widow, who turns his head, corrupts his morals, and drives him headlong into opium addiction. His return home for financial help tragically coincides with Mary’s plan to secrete Joe to the next station and Wilhelm’s arrival with a marshal ready to arrest Joe and his accomplices. Shots are fired, tragedy strikes, and fates are irrevocably altered. Wang’s debut novel ricochets powerfully from blood-soaked barns to battlefields, from domestic tribulations to political espionage. As war erupts, Wang carefully sketches a series of sacrifices and betrayals, leading Mary and Joe to love and Leander to seek redemption.
A vivid, compelling portrayal of the heartbreaking price exacted for freedom.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12235-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
A compulsively readable account of a little-known yet extraordinary historical figure—Lawhon’s best book to date.
A historical novel explores the intersection of love and war in the life of Australian-born World War II heroine Nancy Grace Augusta Wake.
Lawhon’s (I Was Anastasia, 2018, etc.) carefully researched, lively historical novels tend to be founded on a strategic chronological gambit, whether it’s the suspenseful countdown to the landing of the Hindenberg or the tale of a Romanov princess told backward and forward at once. In her fourth novel, she splits the story of the amazing Nancy Wake, woman of many aliases, into two interwoven strands, both told in first-person present. One begins on Feb. 29th, 1944, when Wake, code-named Hélène by the British Special Operations Executive, parachutes into Vichy-controlled France to aid the troops of the Resistance, working with comrades “Hubert” and “Denden”—two of many vividly drawn supporting characters. “I wake just before dawn with a full bladder and the uncomfortable realization that I am surrounded on all sides by two hundred sex-starved Frenchmen,” she says. The second strand starts eight years earlier in Paris, where Wake is launching a career as a freelance journalist, covering early stories of the Nazi rise and learning to drink with the hardcore journos, her purse-pooch Picon in her lap. Though she claims the dog “will be the great love of [her] life,” she is about to meet the hunky Marseille-based industrialist Henri Fiocca, whose dashing courtship involves French 75 cocktails, unexpected appearances, and a drawn-out seduction. As always when going into battle, even the ones with guns and grenades, Nancy says “I wear my favorite armor…red lipstick.” Both strands offer plenty of fireworks and heroism as they converge to explain all. The author begs forgiveness in an informative afterword for all the drinking and swearing. Hey! No apologies necessary!
A compulsively readable account of a little-known yet extraordinary historical figure—Lawhon’s best book to date.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54468-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
A compelling, beautifully rendered tale of passion and pain.
Rome, past and present, serves as the setting for a sparkling historical novel.
Smith (Free Men, 2016, etc.) bounds through 2,000 years of history, following four indelible characters as they grapple with questions of faith, freedom, and transgressive love. Tom, a biologist working in contemporary Rome, is studying ostracods, tiny crustaceans that thrive in polluted, agitated environments. “Are they adapting in the face of disadvantage or are they opportunists of collapse?” Tom asks, aware that his question about ostracods could just as well apply to his own emotional agitation. The married father of a 9-year-old daughter, he has met a young woman who enchants him, impelling him to confront his desperate desire for “an unleashing” and for a love deeper than what he feels for his wife. A child playing in the water where he is investigating suddenly shrieks in pain, pierced by a piece of bent metal, “scaly with corrosion, its silver marred with patches of orange rust.” It is a fishhook—maybe a castoff with no value or perhaps an ancient relic: uncanny, miraculous. The fishhook reappears as Smith leaps back to the Renaissance, where it falls into the hands of Giulia, a mixed-race princess newly married to a Medici, pregnant with another man’s child. For Giulia, her fortunes embroiled in political and religious rivalries, the fishhook evokes a holier time, before corruption and hypocrisy sullied the church. In ninth-century Rome, Felix, a 60-year-old monk, is tormented by his youthful, forbidden love for Tomaso; assigned to watch over the decaying bodies in the putridarium, Felix comes into possession of the fishhook, guessing—wishing—that it belonged to the martyred St. Prisca, who perhaps “got it direct from Jesus.” In the year 165, Prisca did indeed find the hook, secreting it as a precious token. Drawn to worshipping Christ rather than pagan gods, 12-year-old Prisca stands defiant against her violent tormenters. Perhaps Smith’s most appealing character is Satan, whose weary, ironic comments punctuate a narrative that shines with lyrical, translucent prose.
A compelling, beautifully rendered tale of passion and pain.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-287364-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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