This sexy, violent, intricate Western is ultimately a love letter to the Sand Hills, “where all was alive, all living, in...
A deceptively leisurely, intensely heart-rending historical Western about greed and love gone wrong, set in the Sand Hills of Nebraska 10 years after the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre of the Lakota Sioux at the Pine Ridge Reservation in nearby South Dakota.
Hoping to reunite his family and win back his wife, Dulcinea, rancher J.B. Bennett is on his way to retrieve his older son, Cullen, from his father, Drum, who has raised the 19-year-old for 10 years. When J.B. stops to examine the body of a recently strangled young Lakota Sioux named Star, someone he evidently knows shoots him dead. Down-and-out cowboy Ry Graver stumbles across the bodies and is also shot, but only wounded, by the same or perhaps another unseen assailant. Soon Dulcinea returns to the ranch, hoping to rebuild her relationships with Cullen and his 15-year-old brother, Hayward, who was raised by J.B. after Drum took Cullen and Dulcinea left for reasons that emerge slowly and make cruel sense only within the context of Drum’s belief in his family’s destiny. Dulcinea hires a creepily attractive lawyer, Percival Chance, to prove J.B. deeded the ranch to her and hires Graver to help her manage the farm. Dulcinea’s best friend is Star’s sister Rose, whom she met while teaching at Pine Ridge. Both want to learn the murderer’s identity, but while Rose wants revenge and believes the killings have to do with Wounded Knee—Agee (The River Wife, 2007, etc.) doesn’t scrimp on gruesome detail in recounting the massacre attended by most of the novel’s male characters—Dulcinea fears that the guilty party is someone she cares about. Meanwhile, local ranchers itching to sell their oil drilling rights pressure Dulcinea to go along. She resists; Rose and Dulcinea are women strong enough to cow John Wayne.
This sexy, violent, intricate Western is ultimately a love letter to the Sand Hills, “where all was alive, all living, in one form or another.”Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-241347-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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