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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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