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BILLY THE KID

THE LEGEND OF EL CHIVATO

Fackler (Road from Betrayal, 1994, etc.) offers an ambitious portrait of the West's most famous outlaw while sorting out complexities of the bloody Lincoln County War of the late 1870s. A survey of Western buffs would probably reveal that the thing desired least is another novel about Billy the Kid, even though the Kid's life and the Lincoln County War remain elusive subjects, marked by many unknown facts. Fackler bravely takes up the story with the arrival in Lincoln of Alexander McSween, frontier lawyer and honest man. Tensions immediately escalate between him and the established strongman, Jimmy Dolan. In a parallel plot, Fackler presents Henry Antrim, aka Billy the Kid: El Chavito, as an orphaned delinquent with more charm than common sense. She traces his rise to leadership of McSween's Regulators, who would, with Jim Chisum's blessing, oppose Dolan's hired guns. For most writers, the story requires too much speculation to make for satisfactory fiction or even clear history. Fackler, though, relies on actual letters, court records, and eyewitness accounts while filling in the ``holes'' of the unknown with plausible fiction and realistic dialogue, not to mention excellently rich detail of place and period. Of particular interest is her depiction of John Tunstall, noble Englishman and loyal friend of the Kid's, whose vicious murder by Dolan provides the catalyst for the broader conflict. Under Fackler's hand, the ensuing events emerge as compelling tragedy laced with irony and fueled by friendship, loyalty, and love. Most memorable, though, is Billy himself: a likable scoundrel, but a scoundrel nonetheless, an amiable killer, but a killer even so. His crooked smile and deadly gun are complemented by an affability that makes him popular even among his enemies. Pat Garrett, good friend and also infamous killer of the Kid, is possibly given short shrift, but Billy and the time he lived in come off the page and capture the imagination.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-312-85559-1

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Forge

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995

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THE NIGHTINGALE

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

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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