Is there yet any doubt that the historical novel is alive and well once again? Houston has made another significant...
A well-researched and vivid retelling of the Donner Party's 1846 winter ordeal and the struggle for control of the California territory.
This time, there's a dual narrative, shared by elderly Patricia Reed's "Travel Notes" recalling her family's experiences and an omniscient story focussed primarily on her father James Frazier Reed, who had been "banished' from the Donner Party (and thus separated from his family) after he had killed a neighbor in self-defense during a fight. This split focus is occasionally distracting, but it does create considerable suspense, as the bulk of the tale recounts Reed's solitary "passage" through the Sierra Nevadas to the West Coast, where he falls in with such hardy souls as California "liberator" John C. Fremont, Commander John Augustus Sutter (a "self-appointed ambassador at the farthest edge of the civilized world"), and Abner Valentine, an amoral opportunist whose ragtag "militia" uses the occasion of the (recently begun) Mexican War for plunder and profit. Houston (Continental Drift, not reviewed, etc.) subtly links the acquisitive energies of these and other adventurers to the pride that had set Reed apart from, and in opposition to, his westering companions (his family of six had traveled in a lavishly furnished "Palace Car" that exhausted the oxen pulling it), which his daughter—years after he had returned as one of their rescuers—understands and forgives ("It was his own desire and refusal to be thwarted that had put us on the trail . . . and also brought him back into the mountains to carry on the journey"). And when the details of how the starving, exhausted travelers (who were stranded in the Sierras through an unusually cruel winter) are revealed in a long, harrowing climax, the novel gathers real tragic force. This is one of the essential stories of the American westward movement, and seldom has it been told with such exemplary passion and pathos.
Is there yet any doubt that the historical novel is alive and well once again? Houston has made another significant contribution to the genre's revival.Pub Date: April 3, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-41103-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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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