A well-tilled field.
A young farmer must grow beyond the difficult, tragic childhood that hardened him.
Ned Fallow survives the hardscrabble years of his youth during the late 1800s to inherit a chance to make it on his own. Leaving behind the unmerciful Texas plains that claimed the lives of his father, uncle and grandfather, he starts his own wheat farm in the more fruitful lands of Kansas. Setting straight to work, Ned quickly impresses the townsfolk of Midland with his skill and dedication, but also his brusque rudeness. While some, like his neighbor Bill Etheridge, try to gently temper the young man, others find him inexcusably arrogant. He particularly antagonizes Pete Lomax, the town bully, and Shorty Swanson, the shifty general-store assistant with a bit of a drinking problem. He also doesn’t make a terribly pleasant first impression on Lily Thomason, the beautiful new schoolteacher. Ned’s only kindred spirits are the two Mexican laborers he employs and who share his tireless appetite for hard work. As the years pass, Ned gradually begins to open up and accept the fact that a farmer’s life is a hard one and that no one gets by alone. He both benefits from the kindness of others during hard times, and offers his assistance when needed in turn. Lily begins to see him in a new light as well. When he faces a trial after his feud with Lomax results in deadly violence, his future is placed in the hands of his neighbors, and he must hope that enough of them won’t turn their backs on him. McKay’s debut is a well-written, well-researched testament to those who plowed the fields in the early years of this country. His characters are lively and sharply drawn, but his protagonist’s hardness as an adult might not have seemed as credible if he hadn’t so effectively depicted the tragically cruel environment Ned grows up in. The author lets the story’s fairly predictable resolution unfold naturally rather than pushing for superfluous melodrama.
A well-tilled field.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-595-43652-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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