Unglamorous and sad, but compelling.
A first novel explores two friendships in two centuries in the Pacific Northwest.
Raymond’s impressive debut lays out stories linked by shared ground near Portland, Oregon. Callow Cookie Figowitz, cook for a trapping party in the early 19th century, finds a naked stowaway on the fringe of his campsite and, despite the dwindling food supplies, feeds and hides the handsome Henry, an energetic young character who has already sailed the globe and is now hiding from the pack of Russians who murdered his Indian friends nearby. Their ensuing deepening friendship will lead the young men into a somewhat daffy economic venture, the extraction and sale of castoreum, a beaver musk highly prized in China. The castoreum sells, but Cookie is clapped in a Cantonese prison for decades. A hundred and fifty years later, teenagers Tina Plank and Trixie Volterra stalk the same acres, now a slightly bedraggled hippie refuge, in the 1980s. Trixie, exiled from LA after brushes with the law, is living with a family friend. Tina’s mother’s research project in Santa Cruz has fallen victim to Reaganomics, so she’s come to Oregon to regroup, bringing her smart but sullen daughter, who slowly bonds with the more flamboyant Trixie. The hippie ethic leaves the sloppily educated girls to their own devices, in this case the evolution of a goofy but imaginative screenplay about a Philadelphia physician who invents the frontal lobotomy. In the midst of the surprisingly successful beginnings of the film project, Neil Rust, who owns the ragtag farm, uncovers a pair of skeletons on ground that used to be a bog. Despite forensic evidence that the bones belong to a European and an Asian, the local Indians claim ownership and burial rights. The stalemate over the bones becomes a big news story that will eventually trample the film venture and lead to a tragedy as sad as that of Cookie’s end in that same bog.
Unglamorous and sad, but compelling.Pub Date: May 14, 2004
ISBN: 1-58234-448-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
