An average story on an impressive canvas.
Proffitt (Manchester Bluff, 2011) highlights forgotten aspects of local and national history in his second competent work of Civil War–era fiction.
In July 1867, narrator John Demsond, a Confederate cavalry veteran, alights from a train in Abilene, Kan. There, he meets Jason Alexander, a man formerly of Lincoln’s War Department whose father, John T. Alexander, is in the burgeoning cattle business. The family’s plan to drive longhorns from Texas to New York for meat packing has been hampered by outlaws’ and Native Americans’ stealing stock and by the disappearance of one of the hands, not to mention the malicious rumors about their cattle being sick. Demsond recently lost his job with the railway, so he volunteers to go down to Texas to investigate. Over the next decade, Demsond grows further embroiled in the Alexanders’ fortunes, and the rise of the cattle industry becomes a story of mysterious disease transmission, government corruption and corporate monopoly. From obscure historical footnotes, Proffitt has created an impressive backdrop. Enjoyable cameos from real-life figures such as Gen. Custer and Cornelius Vanderbilt add verve to what can seem at times like a tedious chronological survey. Unfortunately, more intriguing Reconstruction incidents (like the Great Chicago Fire, the financial crisis under President Ulysses S. Grant, the Tilden-Hayes election debacle and the Pacific Express train disaster) are often skimmed over in favor of less absorbing material, especially the rather dry proceedings of the 1868 American Convention of Cattle Commissioners, which are documented to an unnecessary level of archival detail. Ultimately, the cattlemen’s tale might have worked better as nonfiction—a group biography or a portrait of one of the major towns (Alexander, Ill., or Kansas City, Mo., the country’s new livestock center). Demsond is a particularly flat character, not compelling enough to warrant the choice of first-person over third-person-omniscient perspective, a viewpoint Proffitt nonetheless frequently employs to chronicle meetings of government conspirators. Solid descriptions of city filth and slaughterhouses don’t redeem dull dialogue and a peculiar reliance on ellipses. The ending, though strangely abrupt, prepares for the final book in this proposed trilogy.
An average story on an impressive canvas.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484081617
Page Count: 374
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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