Next book

NEVER WASTE TEARS

Readers who persevere through the sparse beginning will progress to a more detailed and often heart-rending tale of pioneers...

Fictional diary entries tell the story of two couples who move west to forge new lives during the Reconstruction Era.

Nathan Carter and Rebecca Martin are living in Ohio when the Civil War erupts. Nathan, 13, is left in charge of his father’s store in Eaton when his dad and brothers leave to fight the secessionists. But Nathan dreams of becoming a farmer. Rebecca, 12, is being raised as a proper young lady, as her mother prods her to consider well-to-do suitors. But she has always been smitten with Nathan, whom she sees at the store periodically. He returns her affection and manages to win over her family and secure her hand in marriage. When he announces his intention to move out West with his beloved to farm, Rebecca’s mother is distraught. But Rebecca seems unconcerned about her parent’s worries about “savages.” The couple travel to Independence, Missouri, and join a wagon train, where they meet an older pair, Carl and Hannah Taylor. This is where the story really hits its stride. The journey west is challenging, but reaching their destination, a homestead in Kansas, fails to bring any solace to Rebecca—especially once she realizes she will be living in a house made of sod because there aren’t enough trees in the area to construct a cabin. This is perhaps the least of the trials that the couples will endure. Grief remains a constant throughout their lives. In Kansas-based author Zachgo’s (The Rocking Horse, 2011) historical novel, the prose style differs with every character. For example, Rebecca’s writing is genteel while Carl’s and Hannah’s offerings are less refined. Rebecca’s entries in the beginning of the work are much shorter than Nathan’s and she gets more development through his chronicles than her own. But when the action moves to the prairie, her character gains dimension and her struggles deftly illustrate the loneliness and dangers of life there. At times, these strong passages are wrenching to read. The addition of the Taylors further expands the absorbing story.

Readers who persevere through the sparse beginning will progress to a more detailed and often heart-rending tale of pioneers homesteading in Kansas after the Civil War.

Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-5023-7668-8

Page Count: 406

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: July 24, 2017

Categories:
Next book

THE NIGHTINGALE

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 17


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2019


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • Pulitzer Prize Winner


  • National Book Critics Circle Finalist

Next book

THE NICKEL BOYS

Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 17


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2019


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • Pulitzer Prize Winner


  • National Book Critics Circle Finalist

The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.

Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.

Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.

Pub Date: July 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019

Close Quickview