An engaging first installment in a family saga that will have readers eagerly awaiting the next three.
Thorpe (Bellamy’s Ball, 2015, etc.) offers a historical novel about the O’Shaughnessys of rural Wisconsin.
In 1913, Grandpa Duffy, a stiff-necked old man, dies, but he doesn’t bequeath his dairy farm to Will O’Shaughnessy, his eldest grandson, as expected. Will’s brother, Frank, who’s just as heartless as Grandpa was, gets it instead. Jesse, the youngest of the three O’Shaughnessy brothers, is a hopeless alcoholic, who will eventually come back from World War I grotesquely disfigured. Will still longs be a farmer, having gone to University of Wisconsin and absorbed modern agricultural ideas. He wins the heart of the lovely, smart Mary Tregonning and winds up owning a Ford dealership in Ashley Springs. Prosperity follows, and soon they can afford to buy the finest house in town, where they eventually raise four children. Readers follow these O’Shaughnessys through World War I, the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918—which takes Michael, their firstborn—Prohibition (Will is a moderate drinker, Mary a scolding teetotaler), and the Roaring ’20s, when everyone, even Mary, gets stock market fever. Will is a cautious investor; others, such as his father, are suckered by con men or their own greed. Will soon faces a hard decision as his once-prospering dealership suffers direly. Any novel that starts out with hogs eating Grandpa is sure to grab readers’ attention. But Thorpe doesn’t disappoint as the story goes on; he’s a native of the Badger State himself, and he clearly knows it and its people well. It shows in his novel, which features well-developed characters that ring true. One running, character-based gag, for example, is that Will, a successful Ford dealer, still prefers to ride around in his horse and buggy. As a result, readers will grow to love Will and Mary and the girls, and cheer as they arrive at the farm that Will has wanted for so long.
An engaging first installment in a family saga that will have readers eagerly awaiting the next three.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9849245-4-7
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Little Creek Press
Review Posted Online: May 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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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