A rewarding, if conservatively paced, coming-of-age tale set on the Texas plains.
A Comanche teenager violates tradition in order to save her mother and her people in this debut YA novel.
West Texas, 1860. The looming Civil War has intensified the bad relations between Native Americans and their Texas neighbors—and revived the tribes’ hopes of driving the whites from the land once and for all. Fifteen-year-old Pohoi, the daughter of a Comanche father and a white mother, is curious about the Spirit Power sacred to her people, the Kwahadi Comanche of the Llano Estacado. Her medicine woman aunt, Hunts Medicine, warns her that Pohoi’s desire—or that of any young woman—to seek the power is taboo. The precocious Pohoi, who is already seeing visions, is prepared to buck tradition. Then tragedy strikes: A group of Texans murders Pohoi’s father and abducts her mother. When the warriors of her tribe appear reluctant to rescue her mother, Pohoi, filled with a desire for vengeance, takes up the task herself. She uses the Comanche Spirit Power to transform into a Ghost Warrior of legend and heads off to rescue her mother from the men who stole her. She is led by the ghost of her father, assisted by her friend—and crush—Yellow Bear, and accompanied by Little Rattler, a Mexican captured in a raid who is the son of her aunt. She will have to move quickly, as her visions seem to predict the destruction not just of her family, but her entire people as well. Chalfant’s detailed prose is well tailored to her protagonist’s rhythms and worldview: “As she ran, she heard chattering voices begin to echo throughout the village. Dogs yapped amid the sudden burst of the warriors’ excited shouts inside the council lodge while Pohoi relished the comforting sound of mothers, no longer fearful of the thunder, cooing to their crying babies.” The tensions between the characters and their relationships to their own roles within Comanche society make for some intriguing drama, though the story takes a while to get going. But the immersive setting and Pohoi’s plucky personality do much to sell the novel, and readers will be more or less content to follow her wherever the Spirit Power leads.
A rewarding, if conservatively paced, coming-of-age tale set on the Texas plains.Pub Date: March 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4759-7337-2
Page Count: 324
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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