An entertaining, well-paced yarn, and a sequel that suggests another installment.
A spirited tale of the Old West, with outlaws, jewels, and a few good guys.
Crook brings back the likable narrator of her last novel, The Which Way Tree (2018). It’s two years later, around 1868, and 19-year-old Ben Shreve is working as a carpenter in Comfort, Texas, north of San Antonio. He’s still wondering about his half sister, Sam, who took off in the previous book to hunt down the panther that scarred her and killed her mother. Through an outhouse misunderstanding, Ben winds up sharing his wagon with a treasure hunter named Dickie Bell who has found some unusual jewelry and needs a lift to the gulf town of Indianola. They pick up a man whose horse was stolen by highway robbers, “imposter Indians...dressed up like chiefs,” and who refuses to tell them his name. Down the road a piece, the stranger is shot to death by a young pregnant woman whose stagecoach was being attacked by the same imposters who hijacked the unnamed man, who were then interrupted by a different group of bandits. Nell and her 4-year-old son, Tot, continue with Ben and Dickie. Why she shot the man has to do with marital discord and a vicious outlaw taken from Texas history named Cullen Baker, a.k.a. the Swamp Fox, some of whose men are pursuing Tot. Other perils include a rabid coyote and a rattlesnake. Certain threats may lose their sting because some survivors are obvious, given that the story is told in the form of a long letter from Ben to Tot. As in the last novel, Crook notes Ben’s knowledge of Moby-Dick, but the guiding spirit here feels more like Dickens than Melville. Crook has a gift for engaging details, such as the simple comfort, to a young carpenter raised poor, of a room with a bed and chair and “a nicely carved chest of drawers, with a washbowl atop it, and a small rug alongside the bed.”
An entertaining, well-paced yarn, and a sequel that suggests another installment.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780316564342
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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