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
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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