A grim, terse, often moving first novel about a young Union soldier who comes of age in the waning days of the Civil War. Captured in 1864, Ira Stevens is sent to the South’s most notorious military prison, Andersonville. In a stockade enclosing some 20 acres, many thousands of ill and grotesquely undernourished prisoners struggle to maintain some sense of humanity and to preserve a fragile hope that they may be exchanged for Confederate p.o.w.’s before disease or starvation claims them. A few, including Ira and a small band of his friends, attempt repeatedly without success to tunnel beneath the stockade. The horrors of Andersonville have been depicted before, most notably in MacKinlay Kantor’s epic novel Andersonville. But Higgins (stories: The Importance of High Places, 1993) sets her story apart by offering a concentrated study of how the experience of captivity either corrodes or fosters character. Her portrait of Ira and his friends—the tough, soldierly Gus; the dour, brilliant Marinus; and the amoral Louis—is complex and penetrating. Without overplaying it, she demonstrates a convincing grasp of the language, attitudes, and morality of the period, and the emergence of Ira’s character and beliefs in the midst of degradation is both subtle and believable. The degradation, it should be noted, is considerable: The camp’s only drinking water is contaminated by human waste, starvation ravages bodies and minds, disease of every sort is rampant. Frantic to survive, some sink into violence. Ira tends the ill, watches his friends die, escapes only to be recaptured and tortured, and escapes again. An impressive debut, and a notable contribution to the recent flood of Civil War novels.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-57962-009-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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A love letter to the power of books and friendship.
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Women become horseback librarians in 1930s Kentucky and face challenges from the landscape, the weather, and the men around them.
Alice thought marrying attractive American Bennett Van Cleve would be her ticket out of her stifling life in England. But when she and Bennett settle in Baileyville, Kentucky, she realizes that her life consists of nothing more than staying in their giant house all day and getting yelled at by his unpleasant father, who owns a coal mine. She’s just about to resign herself to a life of boredom when an opportunity presents itself in the form of a traveling horseback library—an initiative from Eleanor Roosevelt meant to counteract the devastating effects of the Depression by focusing on literacy and learning. Much to the dismay of her husband and father-in-law, Alice signs up and soon learns the ropes from the library’s leader, Margery. Margery doesn’t care what anyone thinks of her, rejects marriage, and would rather be on horseback than in a kitchen. And even though all this makes Margery a town pariah, Alice quickly grows to like her. Along with several other women (including one black woman, Sophia, whose employment causes controversy in a town that doesn’t believe black and white people should be allowed to use the same library), Margery and Alice supply magazines, Bible stories, and copies of books like Little Women to the largely poor residents who live in remote areas. Alice spends long days in terrible weather on horseback, but she finally feels happy in her new life in Kentucky, even as her marriage to Bennett is failing. But her powerful father-in-law doesn’t care for Alice’s job or Margery’s lifestyle, and he’ll stop at nothing to shut their library down. Basing her novel on the true story of the Pack Horse Library Project established by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, Moyes (Still Me, 2018, etc.) brings an often forgotten slice of history to life. She writes about Kentucky with lush descriptions of the landscape and tender respect for the townspeople, most of whom are poor, uneducated, and grateful for the chance to learn. Although Alice and Margery both have their own romances, the true power of the story is in the bonds between the women of the library. They may have different backgrounds, but their commitment to helping the people of Baileyville brings them together.
A love letter to the power of books and friendship.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-56248-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
Categories: GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
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