A novel about a remote indigenous town with an intriguing premise but uneven execution.
A young Native American man prepares for a future outside his small community in Campbell’s debut novel.
In the town of Reflection Lake, John is intent on finishing 12th grade, but up to this point, he’s been taking correspondence high school classes. His teachers have told him that he should go to the school in the town of Hope Bay, but his grandfather, Extol Bear, has advised against it because of that school’s history of discrimination. Luckily, it turns out that Reflection Lake’s high school will have teachers this year, and there’s even talk of bringing in a portable science lab. Extol is wary, however, because he once sent John’s father to a residential school that was hostile to Native American culture: “We have heard pleasant words before. They can change overnight.” The school receives a government grant, which enables the students to put on a play. John co-writes and narrates it, which makes him feel even more connected to his community. But although he earns a living as a tourist guide, he’s toying with applying to a university far away. Suddenly, a massive fire encroaches on Reflection Lake, and John and others race to fight it; soon, the young man’s future hangs in the balance. Campbell’s concise novel touches on some cultural issues of lingering importance, including the former practice of forcibly sending young Native Americans to white-run boarding schools. The culture-eradicating practices of the past still weigh heavily on John’s decision-making process in the present day, and Campbell’s portrayal of how memories haunt Extol is powerful. The action scenes during the fire and along the river are also consistently exciting. However, the rest of the narrative doesn’t feel as well-developed; the overall plot isn’t especially strong, and there are a number of scenes that either feel unnecessary or too short.
A novel about a remote indigenous town with an intriguing premise but uneven execution.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5255-3167-5
Page Count: 162
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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