A mostly enjoyable, old-school Western.
A coming-of-age novel tells the story of an orphaned boy learning to survive in the Old West.
In 1853, the Blackthorn family arrives in West Texas from Wales so that its patriarch, the Methodist minister John, can spread the gospel of Jesus to the “wild heathens on the untamed prairies.” But his would-be flock has other ideas, and a Comanche attack leaves everyone in the family dead except for 13-year-old Nigel, who hides in the hollow stump of a tree. When the muleteer Pascal LeBrun wanders through the burned-out campsite a day later, he mistakes the lone survivor for a ghost: “A black apparition rose unsteadily from the funeral pyre—a wavering shadow in the fading light. Ashes scattered as the ghost-like wraith rose, becoming a smoky, wavering illusion.” LeBrun, a defrocked priest, rescues the boy, though he makes him work for his food—something that the spoiled Nigel has not had to do up to this point. Life on the prairie is hard for anyone. For a doughy orphan apprentice to a French-speaking muleteer, it’s doubly difficult. Nigel will have to get tough if he wants to seek revenge on the raiders who killed his family, but first he’ll have to learn how to navigate his new life as a trader on the frontier. In this series opener, Kelso (California Bound, 2017, etc.) writes in a measured prose that deftly summons the diction and texture of life on the prairie in the mid-19th century: “Pascal rode in silence while he glanced at the mules before studying the nearby plains. By summer’s middle, the rolling prairie had dried, withering to various shades of brown from light tan to dark-brown wallows.” The story is a fairly straightforward one and, in its focus on skill acquisition and personal growth, is reminiscent of teenage novels from an earlier era. (Its depiction of Native Americans as wise bestowers of nicknames and ancient knowledge is a less endearing throwback.) LeBrun and Nigel make a compelling pair, and readers should look forward to the orphan’s further adventures.
A mostly enjoyable, old-school Western.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Beachfront Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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