YANKEE INVASION

Name: YANKEE INVASION
Author: Ignacio Solares
ISBN: 978-0-9798249-4-4

by Ignacio Solares and translated by Timothy G. Comption ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2009

A flawed but memorable novel—one that speaks volumes about how Mexicans, or at least the Mexican intelligentsia, views...

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A novel of the Mexican War, when the newly born republic to the south lost half its territory to the slightly older republic to the north; the book was a bestseller in Mexico.

American chauvinists will not like the opening shot of Chihuahua-born academic and writer Solares’s novel: The Stars and Stripes, “symbol of the despicable power which intended to subjugate all nations and cultures of the nineteenth century,” makes it only halfway up the flagpole above the National Palace in Mexico City before its progress is halted. A spirited crowd of civilians attacks the Yankee soldiers raising it, with mild, scholarly Abelardo, the book’s narrator, doing his part by stabbing one blond giant (in this novel, all Americans are giants, most are blond, all are Protestants, and all are devils). The attack affords Solares one of many moments of death porn, all squirts and spasms and twitches: “His eyes turned white, he took one last mouthful of air and then his jaw dropped, releasing a torrent of blood-tinged foam.” Many more such moments follow, their memories chasing Abelardo across the decades until now, at the dawn of the 20th century, his wife is demanding that he get them down on paper or shut up. Solares is unforgiving of the gringos, but also of the leaders of Mexico at the time—in barely three decades, as he notes, the country had 50 changes of government, a fifth of them courtesy of the coup-conjuring Gen. Santa Anna, who, a Saddam of his time, could not have made a better target for the United States. Indeed, Solares imagines a U.S. diplomat urging that Santa Anna be kept around just to keep Mexico unstable, which is plenty plausible. Less plausible are some of his historical inventions and anachronisms; in 1850, for instance, it was Mexico and not the United States that was at war with the Apache Indians, though here the Americans butcher Mexicans “just like they killed off the Apaches!”

A flawed but memorable novel—one that speaks volumes about how Mexicans, or at least the Mexican intelligentsia, views norteamericanos.

Pub Date: May 5, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-9798249-4-4

Page Count: 300

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

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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

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.