This tried-and-true Western yarn delivers a strong hero but hits mostly familiar notes along its journey.
A debut historical novel follows an enterprising young man as he makes his way across the Santa Fe Trail in the 1840s.
Horses play a huge role in many a Western and they were instrumental in the settlement of the frontier, but it’s rarely discussed how so many of the animals actually got there. Hickman aims to fill in this gap with his tale, which focuses on Ross Greenup and his cousin Tim as they set out west from Tennessee. The ostensible goal of the trip is to set up outposts along the Western route to supply horses and mules to travelers. But they are also young men, and they must go West. Things get off to a less than auspicious start; as Ross attempts to meet up with Tim, he comes upon two men trying to rob him, and he shoots one and captures the other. The two friends find on the dead man a bundle of gold, which they decide to keep a secret as they head out West. News of this incident spreads, making them the target of some unsavory folks. Ross and Tim link up with family as well as friendly caravans as they make their way through the new land, including the Clarks, a family settling down in the bluegrass of Kentucky. While helping the Clarks set up their home, Ross meets his distant cousin Sammie, a spunky young woman who tags along with the two partners as they continue to Santa Fe and back to trading, catching their glimpse of the future America, surviving bad storms, and eluding bandits. Hickman has Ross narrate in a present-tense, folksy voice, which, while entertaining, sometimes saps the tension from his more perilous encounters. The plot takes Ross into intriguing territories—and Hickman is adept at evocative landscape descriptions, such as the prairie grass that “rolls in waves like I would picture ocean waves.” But the structure can become repetitive, relying on raids and attacks when the odyssey gets slack. Ross’ character is well-drawn and exhibits growth over the course of the story. The other players, however, do not have as much depth and the villains in the tale are particularly thin.
This tried-and-true Western yarn delivers a strong hero but hits mostly familiar notes along its journey.Pub Date: July 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4897-1269-1
Page Count: 264
Publisher: LifeRichPublishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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