An engaging, sometimes-wondrous work of historical fiction.
Kuri’s debut historical novel tells of a venture to control the fur trade in the Pacific Northwest.
Gabriel Franchère, 24, is a French Canadian from the St. Lawrence Valley, unique among the young men of his village for his ability to read and write. In 1810, he and some of his friends set out with a wilderness-hardened Scotsman and his team of voyageurs on a journey into unknown territories. First they travel to New York City, where their benefactor, immigrant visionary John Jacob Astor, dreams “to unite all the untouched lands of this continent under a single fur trading company of his own.” From New York, they set off on a grueling monthslong journey aboard the Tonquin, around Cape Horn and up to the mouth of the Columbia River, where the great untapped forests of Oregon offer riches for any man bold enough to brave them. An assemblage of adventurers, sailors, and businessmen—some famous, some infamous—surround Franchère as he navigates the streets of Manhattan, the high seas, and the wilds of the Northwest. Their enterprise is that of empire itself, and while it may be an undertaking conceived in the halls of power, it will be realized in blood and smoke at the edges of the known world. Kuri writes in steady, detail-oriented prose reminiscent of the labor that characterizes the world of his fiction: “The stout, elderly Huron, beside a rack of drying strips of meat, prepares a skin using a knife to remove pieces of fat from a wet and soft hide she has previously soaked in brine and staked out with the skin up, that it might dry smooth.” The present tense lends a documentary quality to the story, which banishes romanticism while still keeping readers enthralled in its rhythms. A great depth of research is apparent, and though readers may find that the minutiae stand in the way of a more traditional adventure tale, others will appreciate how deftly Kuri immerses us in a world of tremendous toil, danger, and beauty.
An engaging, sometimes-wondrous work of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-98-626412-2
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Dragon Tree Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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