An effective western thriller graced by a memorable protagonist.
An Indigenous soldier faces danger from both humans and monsters in his last mission for the United States Army in Buzan’s novel.
In 1872, a unit of U.S. troops heads to Oregon by train carrying gold meant for the U.S. Army. A Nez Perce man named Jolon Winterhawk is a cavalry soldier and Civil War veteran nearing the end of his career in the military; he’s eager to retire but feels a sense of foreboding. The train is ambushed by vigilante Ramòn Cornadez and a band of soldiers, who mean to take the gold to Mexico. The ambush is violent, and Winterhawk is the sole survivor. Meanwhile, a massive creature is attacking men in the region. Winterhawk doesn’t know about this danger—he assumes the cries he hears in the distance are wolves—but he makes a decision to follow protocol instead of fleeing the scene, meaning he must take care of the dead and, to complete his final mission as a soldier, deliver the gold to its intended destination. Two days after he sets off with the gold, a couple of U.S. Army officers, Maj. Ambrose Toomey and Cpt. Thomas Isbell, find the wreckage of the train and conclude that a traitor turned on his unit; the new arrivals don’t trust Winterhawk because he’s Indigenous and assume he’s trying to steal the gold (“What was your plan, Lieutenant Winterhawk? You made a deal with General Cornadez? You provided him with the train route in exchange for half of the money?”). Ultimately, Toomey and Isbell decide to steal the gold for themselves. Winterhawk remains determined to carry out his mission, but can he escape both his human antagonists and the monster in the woods? The novel is part western and part horror, and some of the violence is extreme. The pacing is not quite right; the author sometimes interrupts action sequences to deliver exposition or historical information. The text includes copious period detail, and a lot of this material is compelling, but as a result the book sometimes reads more like a history textbook than novel. Still, it’s a tense, exciting adventure, and Winterhawk is a charismatic and honorable hero.
An effective western thriller graced by a memorable protagonist.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781685132507
Page Count: 273
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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