An emotionally resonant tale of familial connections.
In Lowder’s debut historical novel, two communities struggle to find healing after a massacre in the Utah Territory in the 19th century.
In 1857, a wagon train from Arkansas heading west meets a violent end when 120 of its men, women, and children are killed. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in nearby Parowan take in the surviving 17 children, saying that Paiute Native Americans carried out the attack, but in the rest of the country, popular opinion judges LDS members to be “bigamous heathens,” and assumes that they were behind the bloodshed themselves. The eponymous “last orphan” is Tommy Dunning, née Levi Cantrell, who’s only 3 when his parents are killed; he’s immediately adopted by LDS members Bennet and Eva Dunning in Parowan. Two years later, Tommy’s memories of his birth parents are little more than nightmares, but U.S. Army soldiers come to make good on LDS leader Brigham Young’s promise to return the orphans to their extended families. It turns out that Tommy’s biological grandmother, Ruby Seddon, knew that her grandson was alive by divine vision—“My grandson Levi surely lives, as God in Heaven revealed it.” Notorious detective Allan Pinkerton takes on the task of finding answers for Ruby. Lowder effectively ramps up the tension between two women who love Tommy dearly—the only mother he knows, and the grandparent he doesn’t remember—as each woman fights for the boy and his future. Over the course of the novel, the author keeps up a quick pace, even as he juggles many different characters in locales across the country. Some of the characters’ interactions seem a bit contrived at times. However, the book has a compelling premise at its center, and the story is alive with emotional truth, as when Eva struggles to keep her family intact by keeping her son’s identity a secret, and resists her husband’s desire to take a second wife.
An emotionally resonant tale of familial connections.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73407-991-3
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Rockhampton Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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