A relatable account of a shameful episode in American history, although its sensibility seems overly modern at times.
This historical novel tells the story of Moore’s (An Ocean Away, 2017, etc.) ancestor, who was hanged for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 17th century.
Susannah Martin (nee North, 1621–1692) was one of the 20 people, including 14 women, who were executed in the infamous Salem witchcraft trials. This novel begins in 1692 as she, along with others awaiting trial—including a 4-year-old girl—languish uncomfortably for three months in Salem Jail. In flashbacks, Susannah remembers her past, beginning in 1646. She was 25 then, living in Salisbury, Massachusetts, still a spinster, and looking to stay that way—until a handsome young widower, George Martin, moved to a neighboring farm. He flirted with her, but she didn’t believe that he was truly interested, because she considered herself “plain, short, and too round.” As the novel traces their courtship, Susannah’s early rebuffs of George’s flirtations reveal her prickly, stubborn personality, a lifelong characteristic: “Calling me a troublemaker is highly accurate,” she notes. “I’ve never been one to keep my opinions to myself.” She was first accused of witchcraft in 1669 (the charges were dropped, but Susannah’s reputation was damaged); later, she and George became embroiled in several lawsuits and court battles with the local Putnam family, losing many decisions. After her husband’s death, Susannah was impoverished, leaving her vulnerable, and on July 19, 1692, she and four others were executed by hanging. Moore does a good job of illustrating her ancestor’s predicament. Susannah’s own words, from real-life trial records, are especially affecting, such as when she laughs at the fits of her accusers, who were young girls: “Well I may at such folly.” However, the couple’s many scenes of courtship become repetitive, smacking of high school dating with its jealousies and snits. Although the book appears well-researched, for the most part, its version of Puritanism can seem ahistorical, allowing such things as loose hair and dancing. And although Moore calls out the issues that led to the accusations, such as the Putnam family’s money, power, and greed for land, she pays little attention to the accusers themselves, and what, besides their parents’ political interests, led to their mass hysteria.
A relatable account of a shameful episode in American history, although its sensibility seems overly modern at times.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-941145-95-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: Mirror Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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