A dramatic, historically illuminating soap opera about a woman’s adventures in a Canadian lumber camp.
A debut historical novel captures the international turmoil following the Napoleonic Wars.
Susan Anderson was raised in London to be a genteel woman at ease among cosmopolitan sophisticates, but she is eventually struck by a sense of adventure. She travels to the hinterlands of northern Canada in the late 1830s with her widowed father, Rev. Thomas Anderson, who ventures there to make his missionary rounds. The two stay in a lumber camp established in an unforgivingly rustic environment, and Susan’s beauty unsettles the men, unused to such company. A drunken ruffian, Henri Lalond, assaults her one night, and she is saved by Dan Little Deer, who kills the attacker and flees. The relationship between the lumber company and the indigenous population is a delicate one, and the trial of Dan for murder could be potentially explosive. Susan also contends with complex romantic opportunities; a man close to her father’s age proposes to her and offers to whisk her away to the tropical climes of Jamaica. Then she starts to fall in love with the camp manager, John McIver. Meanwhile, her father is badly injured and grows dangerously ill. A journalist, Holt-Johnstone has produced a historically astute novel, capturing the collision of native North American culture and European exploration in the 1800s. The plot unfolds briskly, and the author artfully constructs an atmosphere of dangerous expectancy. Sometimes the dialogue can be wooden and halting, even for the mid-19th century. At one point, John asserts: “If it were not for the simple skills I learned as a child watching my father in his practice at Annandale, and the use of herbs the Indians gather here in the forest, mortality among my men would be much greater.” But the author does an admirable job developing Susan’s character; she’s both callow and precociously wise. In some ways, she represents the spirit of the age, hopefully adventurous but a touch naïve. It seems bizarre that her father brought her to Canada in the first place—he informs no one at the camp in advance of his trip that she’s accompanying him, and he should know he’s possibly putting her in harm’s way. But despite its flaws, this book remains an entertaining and well-researched work.
A dramatic, historically illuminating soap opera about a woman’s adventures in a Canadian lumber camp.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63135-966-8
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing & Rights Agency
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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