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GONE TO IDAHO

Name: GONE TO IDAHO
Author: Enid E. Haag
ISBN: 978-1-4808-4624-1

by Enid E. Haag ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 25, 2017

A tender but somewhat cloying romantic tale.

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In this early-20th-century drama, a teenager sets off in search of her long-lost mother.

In 1906, Ida Roeder is nearly killed in an earthquake in San Francisco. She’s separated from her husband and daughter and suffers from amnesia but is cared for by an altruistic stranger, Jamie. She moves with him to Idaho, takes on the name Liz—she can’t recall her own—and only remembers her former life in hazy scraps. Meanwhile, her husband, Bruno, who has believed her dead for five years, leaves New Mexico for Idaho when he discovers evidence she’s alive. Emma, Ida and Bruno’s 15-year-old daughter, exasperated she is left behind, decamps for Idaho on her own. Two of her best friends, Juan and Wolfe, join her on the journey, each harboring his own unexpressed romantic devotion to her, touchingly captured by Haag (Gone to Texas, 2016). Emma learns that her father is badly injured in an accident and has drifted into a coma. She rushes to be by his side, where she encounters Liz, who’s drawn to Bruno for reasons she’s still unprepared to fully fathom. And Jamie, who suspects that Bruno is her husband, moves him into his own home for medical care despite the deep love he feels for Liz. Jamie’s best friend, Dillon, warns him that he’s setting himself up for inevitable heartache, but he also becomes enchanted by Liz. His affection pits him against Jamie as a romantic rival. This second installment in the New Mexico Gal series is a complex but emotionally affecting family story. Haag artfully weaves together several romantically charged plotlines, and the tale hustles forward at a lively pace. But she tries to cram too much into a short novel, and those entanglements can feel frivolously soap-operatic. In addition, the prose can be torturously earnest. At one point, Jamie muses about Liz: “How old might the lady be? he wondered. Perhaps younger by a couple of years, judging from her firm and desirable body. Hey, wait a minute, his brain said. Are you lusting? No! You can’t be, his inner voice answered.”

A tender but somewhat cloying romantic tale.

Pub Date: July 25, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-4808-4624-1

Page Count: 226

Publisher: Archway Publishing

Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2017

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION

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WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES

by Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

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Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.

Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016

Categories:

RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Hulu’s ‘We Were the Lucky Ones’ Adds To Cast

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SHOGUN

by James Clavell ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 23, 1975

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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.