Richman’s mastery of the emotional geography is illuminating, and Dickie’s dichotomous affections call to mind the work of...
A conflicted woman faces the ghosts of her desert childhood in this heartfelt Western drama from Richman (Riding in the Shadows of Saints: A Woman’s Story of Motorcycling the Mormon Trail, 2005).
Darlene “Dickie” Sinfield was determined to escape her rustic roots. But even after 30 years away, working in the trenches of big-city journalism, it’s clear that she has only nominally succeeded. The death of her cowpoke brother Heber, poisoned in a military accident, brings her back from Salt Lake City to Clayton, an austere backwater in the high desert. The place has left a mark, as evidenced by her thoughtful, evocative remembrance. Her father is abusive, beating her sister Annie with a horse halter and cloaking his own weaknesses with a false bravado. Her mother, unfulfilled, seeks company with a convivial neighbor, Bev Christensen. Our heroine’s childhood is severe: “Dropped off a horse onto her head. She’ll be fine. Dragged by a steer. She’ll be fine…. Branded. She’ll be fine. Shot at. She’ll be fine.” At what point, Dickie asks, “do the actions of grown-ups add up to a child who actually won’t be fine?” Ironically, it’s the reluctant cowgirl who shows real talent. Her father, by contrast, is a refugee suburbanite seeking a life cribbed from television westerns. Now back in Clayton, Dickie struggles to come to terms with her family’s unconventional foibles and her traumatic encounter with the nerve gas that drove her away and finally killed her brother. She must also resolve her paradoxical affections for an urbane doctor and the laconic, straightforward cowboy, Stumpy Nelson, whose affections surface upon the prodigal daughter’s return.
Richman’s mastery of the emotional geography is illuminating, and Dickie’s dichotomous affections call to mind the work of Pat Conroy.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-125718-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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