Stirring, often bitter, but ultimately uplifting.
Prequel to Sign-Talker (2000), introducing an 18th-century female Shawnee Indian chief whose pursuit of peace leads to endless conflict with lovers, friends, and foes.
We meet Nonhelema (“Not a Man”) in 1774, on the eve of a confrontation with British soldiers loosely allied to a division of colonial troops. Though nearly fifty, she has the lithe body of a woman half her age and fights alongside her fiercest male warriors. Her entourage includes an escaped African slave as well as a daughter from a previous liaison with a Caucasian. Nonhelema’s mother, now named Elizabeth, has converted to Christianity and lives full-time in a nearby Christian mission. The British are marching on Shawnee lands in what are now portions of western Pennsylvania and Ohio to claim, by force if necessary, the hunting grounds they say were sold to them by the Iroquois. The Shawnees say those grounds do not belong to anyone and cannot be sold. Nonhelem’s tribe wants war, and they fight so fiercely that the Colonial army asks for a parley. Things go from bad to worse as Nonhelema realizes that, despite the compassionate love of the Christian God whites claim to believe in, the intruders will eventually take everything the Shawnees hold dear. Never afraid to fight, she counsels peace because she has blood ties and religious loyalties on both sides. (Among the plot twists is her brief fling with a rough-and-ready frontiersman, Alexander McKee, which results in another offspring.) Conflicting relations with the British and the colonials during the Revolutionary War bring about the massacre of Nonhelema’s tribe, and she faces a future that, while uncertain, is no less noble. Collaborating for the first time on fiction with his Shawnee wife, Thom adds to his gallery of Native American heroes a woman whose character transcends her culture, but whose culture gives her incomparable skills, strengths, beauty and insights.
Stirring, often bitter, but ultimately uplifting.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-44554-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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