A treat for both history and nature lovers.
A crow escapes the famous sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, and lyrical adventure follows.
In 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald left port in Wisconsin, carrying pellets of iron ore in its 730-foot-long hull. It sailed across Lake Superior, headed for Michigan under the supervision of Capt. Ernest M. McSorley, aka the “Bad Weather Captain.” Fatefully, a storm called the Witch of November rose from the Gulf of Mexico. Tearing across the country, it eventually hit the Great Lakes, slamming the Edmund Fitzgerald with rogue waves that knocked out its radar and breached its hull. While trying to reach the safety of nearby Whitefish Point (with radio help from fellow ship the Anderson), the “Mighty Fitz” sank with no human survivors. In this telling, however, Caw Caw the crow escaped his cage in the cabin and flew to Miner’s Beach, on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. There, having also rescued a small cat from the ship’s deck, his adventures begin. He eventually reaches Traverse Bay, where he meets more interesting animals and even a women’s hockey team. Sadly, everything reminds Caw Caw of the Native American man who once placed the gifts of an arrowhead and a teddy bear in his cage. Is there any hope of reuniting with this old friend? Author Whitmer (Aloha Rainbow, 2006) answers the question with engaging lyricism. Describing the Witch of November, she writes: “Off portside, she lay sideways as if riding a jet wind broom; her head oddly crowned by dim moonlight.” Alongside photos and diagrams of the Edmund Fitzgerald, these glimpses of beauty amid chaos characterize the novel’s first half. In the second half, when Caw Caw meets the hockey team, humor lightens the tone: “[S]hopping was their first sport,” and they “were masters of ransacking shop after shop, their scoring-system seemed to rack up points for collecting the best sale items.” Unfortunately, much of Whitmer’s prose suffers from an overuse of commas—e.g., “The captain leaned, on the top railing, and called down”—often making for stilted reading. But her knack for poetic imagery more than compensates.
A treat for both history and nature lovers.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475951356
Page Count: 198
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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