A meaty, enjoyable drama about the personalities clashing over the building of the Erie Canal.
A historical romance focuses on the construction of the Erie Canal.
In this attractively designed reissue of Casey’s 1988 novel, A Land Beyond the River, the action opens in 1810, when the United States is already straining its boundaries and yearning to stretch out west. One avatar of that dream is New York City Mayor DeWitt Clinton, who wishes to orchestrate the building of a great waterway extending west of the Hudson River to Lake Erie. The author vividly conveys the somewhat grubby passion that motivates Clinton, a combination of vision and avarice that he’s well aware can only come to fruition with the cooperation of a grand alignment of social, political, and financial powers throughout the Hudson Valley and beyond. He has ideas along these lines, too, but he also faces a major obstacle, and it’s not the impenetrable wilderness between him and his destination. It’s the young and ferociously ambitious future president and Tammany Hall operator Martin Van Buren, who wants to scupper the project for his own reasons. In Clinton’s search for allies, he seeks to enlist two key figures: the wealthy, influential widow Eleanora Van Rensselaer and the wily, rough-hewn ship captain Daniel Hedges. As the story gains momentum, the growing challenges of planning and erecting the Erie Canal are joined with the looming threat of a renewed war with Britain. The tale follows its tight central cast of characters through the War of 1812, with the tensions of the narrative coming to a head.
The main frictions of Casey’s story derive not from the work of engineering or the cultural expansion of the plot but from the more personal facets. Eleanora has a scandal buried in her past linked to her deceased husband, and Clinton’s clashes with all the political characters in his path feature bristling personalities. Aaron Burr, for instance, is “far too slippery,” and Clinton angrily refers to Van Buren as “the bastard son of an innkeeper.” These personal elements electrify the narrative. They make the story so compulsively readable that they entirely vindicate the author’s decision to give the book an attractive cover and reissue it for a new readership. Casey has a remarkable ability to bring alive the daily life of the Hudson Valley at the beginning of the 19th century and to invest all these well-known historical figures, like Burr and Van Buren, with flawed, three-dimensional qualities. In fact, the novel’s only noticeable flaw is the imbalance between the two narrative emphases: Alongside the richly textured historical figures, Daniel and particularly Eleanora often seem thinly contrived and stereotypical. The author’s skill at dramatizing the Byzantine politics behind financing and constructing the Erie Canal is so pronounced that most readers may find themselves wishing he’d stuck to that and left the romantic plot on the drawing-room floor. And curiously, despite what seems like the narrative’s best efforts, the standout character is easily Van Buren—probably a first for American fiction.
A meaty, enjoyable drama about the personalities clashing over the building of the Erie Canal.Pub Date: March 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73436-662-4
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Diamonds Big as Radishes LLC
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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