A captivating generational tale of one family’s pioneering travels during America’s 19th-century westward expansion.
Based on the adventures of the real-life ancestors of Adair’s husband, the story begins in 1805 with a wagon train traversing dangerous mountain terrain from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to Ohio in search of a plentiful land. Adair masterfully weaves pivotal events of the 1800s such as slavery, Bleeding Kansas and the Pike's Peak gold rush into the lives of the Adair family as they venture from Virginia to Ohio, Indiana and Kansas. Adair, a former English teacher, has crafted a perfect mix of action, tragedy and romance. Main character Ben Adair’s courtship of his betrothed Ann is awkward and endearing. Adair doesn’t shy away from the graphic brutality of Native American war parties on the Santa Fe Trail and bloody carnage on the battlefields of Shiloh, Bull Run and Gettysburg. The perils of farming and the unrefined wilderness are both enticing and dangerous as the Adairs encounter fires, locusts and crop-eating squirrels. Although they are a tight-knit bunch, the extended family find themselves on opposing sides of critical issues of slavery, religion and the Civil War. Adding extra tension is Ben’s involvement in the Underground Railroad, which results in tragic consequences. The underlying theme throughout is the hope of a promised land. For settlers it’s the fertile, uncultivated soil of new territories. For the runaway slaves, it’s the freedom of the North, and for Confederates it’s the Dixie way of life. At times it’s tough to keep track of relations in the ever-expanding Adair clan, but the story remains centered around Ben as he matures from a brave 9-year-old to the upstanding patriarch of the Family. With 2011 marking the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, Adair’s novel is a fitting, rousing tribute to the courage of ordinary families who made extraordinary sacrifices.
Pub Date: June 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463517434
Page Count: 283
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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