An accessible, entrancing story that draws readers into a family’s many triumphs and travails.
This posthumous release by first-time novelist Norris largely succeeds in ensnaring fans of multigenerational melodramas.
Norris tells the saga, based on a true story, of the Mattisons, a family of hardscrabble, mountain farmers in West Virginia who, out of desperation, develop a small outcrop of coal on their property and become miners. The novel follows the secretive, nefarious way the mining venture got its startup capital—which causes the family’s daughter, Gem, to strike out on her own, becoming the madam of the lone bawdy house in the nearby town of Fairmont, while her brothers join her father in what grows into the world’s largest coal corporation. As the Mattisons flourish and become a mining dynasty, Norris does a marvelous job getting readers emotionally invested in the ever-expanding family, especially those members working to better the hazardous conditions for the miners, despite the deplorable indifference of the coal barons. Like such generational-saga veterans as James Michener and John Jakes, Norris admirably weaves fascinating historical details into her narrative, with her exhaustive research giving context to events within her novel. Following the Mattisons takes readers on a journey through the development of West Virginia’s coal mining industry, which comes to rule the state. Norris, a former West Virginia schoolteacher, started the novel at the age of 72, but failing health caused her to set it aside in the midst of revisions. Her son Randolph rediscovered the work, which had been tucked in a closet for 23 years, and shepherded it through to publication. Norris’ legacy is an engrossing tale of love and heartbreak, wealth and greed. The book would have benefited from more thorough editing, though, to remove repetitiveness and fix typos, but the story’s overall strength overcomes these shortcomings.
An accessible, entrancing story that draws readers into a family’s many triumphs and travails.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481772693
Page Count: 260
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
