A novel of war and recovery from a consummate storyteller at the height of his powers.
A thriller follows a family living near Richmond during the Civil War.
It’s September 1862 in this historical novel, and the Confederate and Union armies have all of Richmond on edge. Following Gen. Robert E. Lee’s advance north, a father and daughter of the Richmond gentry open their doors to care for a Southern officer badly wounded by Union foragers near Mechanicsville. Capt. John S. Holland, scion of a wealthy family allied with Jefferson Davis, took a ball in the leg that shattered his femur in two places. He convalesces in a newfangled contraption designed to spare him amputation while Anna Van Meer reads aloud to keep his spirits up. In Anna’s opinion, “Those who want the war should have it in abundance and leave the rest of us alone.” Her father hates slavery, and before the conflict broke out she assisted him in the operation of a station on the Underground Railroad. She suspects he has kept that station going all this while. After he accepts the captain, Anna wonders why her father is striving “to create the illusion they were supporters of the Southern cause,” recalling that “they’d never gone to such lengths before.” But the war closes in, and before long Anna finds herself in flight, away from the comfort she’s known and with the principal folks in her heart put to a test. Holland, for whom she’s fallen, works valiantly to protect her, though he knows himself to be “a diminished man.” Wallace (The Man Who Walked out of the Jungle, 2017, etc.) is a serious artist who never fails to attend to his audience’s needs, providing fast-moving action and characters of real depth. Though they might have come across as implausible clichés, both Anna and Holland strike the reader as complex and credible, and their early courtship (during which “his presence was like a noxious smell that rendered her life wretched”) convinces in an accomplished, fresh, and indirect style. The author understands the period well. The intricacy with which he layers his characters’ historical imaginations can only enrich any reader’s understanding of the tensions of the 1860s and the tangled hearts of men and women.
A novel of war and recovery from a consummate storyteller at the height of his powers.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2017
ISBN: 970-0-9983291-5-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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