A book that takes real historical characters, mixes magic with the winning of the West and conjures an absorbing tale.
In 1867, Compars Herrmann and his brother Alexander are the two most renowned illusionists in the world. Compars, the elder, performs in Europe, while Alexander goes to perform in America, sawing women in half and pulling rabbits from hats. Meanwhile, their younger cousin Julius Meyer is kidnapped in Nebraska by Ponca Indians. The Ponca spare his life but make him a slave, and he quickly learns their language and customs, becoming their interpreter. Before his capture, he’d been involved with the beautiful prostitute Lady-Jane Little Feather, who works in an Omaha brothel but burns it down, killing her cheating employer and others before high-tailing it back to the Ponca. U.S. Army soldiers—bluecoats—are in the middle of destroying the Indian tribes. Julius, a Jew, easily relates to the hostile treatment the Indians are receiving. In time, he falls in love with Prairie Flower, posing the prospect of personal harm and heartbreak. The novel covers a broad tableau that mixes murder, intrigue, sibling rivalry, personal grudges, magic and even romance—though not the magic of romance. The small Ponca tribe suffers an angry split—one group goes off to fight the bluecoats to the death, while the other quietly endures whites’ betrayal and a Trail of Tears. There is plenty of trickery in this novel: stealing ideas from siblings, transforming a beautiful Indian woman into an “Arabian princess,” promising Indian tribes they will never have to move from their homes. Kolpan weaves all the threads together and shows the ultimate fate of each character. He portrays a transformative period for America, one full of tragedy and illusion.
A well-researched and entertaining novel filled with colorful characters and imagination. It’s a good, fun read.Pub Date: June 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60598-369-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
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. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
18
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A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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