A captivating tale about a Civil War veteran’s search for Crazy Horse.
In this historical novel, a legendary soldier and wealthy rancher gets drawn back into the fray, recruited to help end a terrible war with Native Americans.
Josey Angel’s reputation precedes him all over the country. He is known as a Union soldier who fought in the Civil War and later battled Native Americans, earning him the moniker the “Angel of Death.” But now he goes by the name Josef Angliewicz and tries to put all that violence behind him—he’s a successful rancher in Montana with a wife, Annabelle, and a daughter, Isabelle. Still, old habits prove hard to break when he’s recruited by the Army to track down fearsome Native American Chief Crazy Horse, who is blamed for the grisly slaughter of Whites and is considered an obstacle to a peace treaty with Indian nations. Josey, in response to the economic incentives promised and out of an incurable restlessness, accepts the mission and heads out in search of Crazy Horse. But Josey is both hunter and prey—Atticus Grieve holds him responsible for the death of his father and son, who were killed fighting Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s forces when they marched through Georgia. Overwhelmed by grief, Atticus only finds consolation in the anticipation of Josey’s murder. Catron deftly captures the anarchic spirit that reigned in the immediate wake of the Civil War, when order strained, often tyrannically, to impose itself. In addition, he provides a sensitive portrayal of the plight of the Native Americans, capable of extraordinary cruelty but also brutalized themselves by Whites, who often saw them as subhuman. The author’s prose is the novel’s principal weakness—Catron displays a tendency to reach for melodramatic heights in the canned language of old cinematic Westerns. He seems anxious that readers won’t fully appreciate the depth of Josey’s tough-guy credentials and so repeatedly announces them to fatiguing effect. Consider this exchange between a woman inquiring about Josey and a store clerk: “ ‘There are only two kinds of people who go looking for Josey Angel. Them that need his help are the first.’ ‘And the other?’ ‘Them that want to die.’ ” Still, this is too dramatically gripping and historically intriguing a tale to be sunk by the author’s prose style.
A captivating tale about a Civil War veteran’s search for Crazy Horse.Pub Date: April 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4328-8856-5
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Five Star
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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