An ambitious debut novel chronicles the making of an outlaw in frontier California.
Young Tiburcio Vasquez, the hero of Caraccio’s tale, was born in Mexico but raised in the United States, staying in the vicinity of Monterey, California. The year is 1854, and, as soon as the West Coast is conquered, “thousands of squatters are swarming all over the region, from Sacramento to San Francisco.” Tiburcio, a strapping vaquero, master horseman, and snappy guitarist, runs afoul of the new law in town when his cousin Anastacio Garcia shoots a constable in a bar fight. When the town’s vigilantes hold Tiburcio equally guilty, the young man flees to the mountains. Treated as an outlaw, he becomes one, rustling cattle and horses and encouraging his fellow natives to defy the invaders. “In the end,” he promises himself, “you will stand tall and they will cower like beaten dogs.” Tiburcio’s planned rebellion fails, but he proves to be a skillful bandit and spends the remaining 20 years of his life adventuring in the mountains, desert plains, and fields and fermenting insurrection in the jail cells of California (where he becomes a bit of a celebrity, because “he gave the ignorant brutes encouragement that life would improve once they were freed”). All the while, he pines for his true love, Anita, “the slender beauty whose dark eyes reflected the world right back to him.” Eventually, Anita becomes embroiled in the revolutionary politics Tibrurcio stirs up, involved enough to risk her own life and freedom. There is a good deal of truth in Caraccio’s fiction. Tiburcio was a real agitator and, later, an authentic legend in his home state. According to some sources, he was eventually memorialized as the pulp hero Zorro. In Caraccio’s story, the original proves more than a match for the famous avenger, so much so as to occasionally strain plausibility. The author’s research is impeccable, but this is a sweeping book, so necessary invention abounds. Readers come to know not only Tiburcio, but also the people around him: villagers, renegades, and gringos alike. The prose here is always clear and readable, and this 508-page book might have been even longer while still remaining every bit as enlightening and suspenseful.
A lively epic of love, invasion, flight, and revolt in the years following the Mexican-American War.
Pub Date: June 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4991-6597-5
Page Count: 508
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
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