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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
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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