We are in the hands of a skilled storyteller, and every word matters. A captivating story, and one that cries for a sequel.
There are two good reasons to go to Gatlinburg. One is to visit Dolly Parton’s theme park. Mosher (On Kingdom Mountain, 2007, etc.) limns the other in this expertly written novel.
Longtime readers of Mosher will not be surprised to find that his latest opens on ground well trod in other novels: the mountain country of northern Vermont, and specifically Kingdom Mountain, his Yoknapatawpha County. Morgan Kinneson is an exceedingly bright 17-year-old who has spent his young life exploring every corner of the mountain, becoming so knowledgeable about the place that he and his older brother Pilgrim had brought the pioneering naturalist Louis Agassiz “to the mountaintop to examine the glacial erratics, boulders brought down from the Far North by the great ice sheet.” Things have changed now, for Pilgrim, who had been packed off to college, has joined the Union Army and has now gone missing at the Battle of Gettysburg. Helping a runaway slave make his way north to Canada, Morgan is attacked by mysterious renegades—or are they rebel spies?—who want something of the fugitive’s. That something (readers of On Kingdom Mountain might just have a clue as to what it is), and perhaps a curse on his “yallow head” by one of his fallen tormentors, puts Morgan on a run that takes him to the still-fresh battlefield, down the back of the mountains and deep into the Confederacy in search of his missing brother. Morgan battles illness and attendant hallucinations, enjoys a “peaceful interlude in the heart of the land of the Brethren,” spends time in the rebel capital, falls in love and otherwise has grand adventures that would seem improbable in lesser hands. And if a long walk through the Civil War–era South seems familiar, consider the author of the echoing book one of those lesser hands by comparison with Mosher, who closes with a grand unexpected moment that, on reflection, makes perfect sense.
We are in the hands of a skilled storyteller, and every word matters. A captivating story, and one that cries for a sequel.Pub Date: March 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-45067-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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