A worthwhile literary contribution to the popular Amish-fiction subgenre.
In her debut novel, Moore draws on her great-grandmother’s life story to explore the challenges of the Amish lifestyle and a journey West.
Aaron and Ruth Holtz are Amish farmers in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with four children and another on the way. At home, they often speak German, and a hereditary fear of persecution still plagues them—after all, Ruth’s Anabaptist grandfather was tortured in the old country. In the fall of 1867, two Americans come to see Aaron, who’s reputed to sell the best horses around. (Ruth calls the strangers “English,” her term for anyone of Anglo-Saxon descent.) They’re heading to Idaho and convince Aaron that he and his family should join them. Contradicting the community elders, Aaron insists that his family’s departure isn’t “breaking” with the Fold but “expanding” it. As the weeks pass and the Holtzes join a larger Conestoga wagon train, it becomes harder for them to preserve their traditions. For instance, their new acquaintance, Hortence, snatches up Ruth’s newborn baby and baptizes him while she’s away. The wagons also travel on the Sabbath, and after a fire, Aaron must have his singed beard trimmed—two more religious affronts. Things go from bad to worse when thieves steal their animals and a fever rages through the camp. Job-like, Ruth questions God when faced with wrenching losses. Overall, Moore’s tale of hardship and survival takes up classic Western themes but adds in Amish heritage as an intriguing twist. Ruth’s close third-person perspective provides the soul of the novel; it’s full of warm, descriptive language, quaint terminology (such as “littles” for children), and fresh, folksy metaphors (“West. The word flapped in the kitchen, like the grackle she’d caught in their milk-house”). Flashbacks return incessantly to Ruth’s and Aaron’s pre-trip preparations, and these, along with frequent fragmentary and verb-free sentences, break up the flow of the present-day action. However, they also allow Moore to jump right into the wagon journey without tiresome preliminaries. By contrast, Ruth’s letters to her brother, Dan’l, are a highlight throughout.
A worthwhile literary contribution to the popular Amish-fiction subgenre.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0451469984
Page Count: 336
Publisher: NAL
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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