A historical novel with vivid descriptions of its time and place but that would have benefited from some streamlining.
In the early 1860s, an orphaned Swedish girl comes of age in what becomes the Idaho Territory in this latest installment in the High Valley Home series.
The Larson family of Swedish immigrants first appeared in Dorris’ Sheepeater (2009, etc.), which focused on Erik Larson, a boy who was adopted by Indians. Here, Dorris turns to Erik’s sister, Katrine, who at 9 years old becomes separated from her family during their wagon-train trek west from Minnesota to the high valley north of Fort Boise. The kind Olafson family takes her in, however, and they treat her like a daughter. The immigrants face all the usual dangers and trials of breaking new ground with few supplies in a new country, but they slowly improve their rough lean-tos, sow crops, acquire livestock, set up schools of a kind for their children, and so on. Still, challenges and setbacks arise, including hailstorms, fires, mountain lions, and illness. But there are rewards, as well, including fertile ground, hot springs, and good neighbors. Katrine, meanwhile, grows up as a typical girl of her time and place, doing chores, going to school, playing with friends, and looking forward to special treats on such holidays as Midsummer’s Eve and St. Lucia’s Day. As she’s about to turn 15, Katrine stands on the brink of adulthood, engaged to marry. Still, the small community has some tragedies, as well. Overall, this is a well-researched account that vividly shows the daily hard work and special difficulties of life for pioneer settlers. The descriptions of handmade chairs, floors, and other items are entertaining, and the focus on Swedish culture and the Idaho setting enrich the story, taking it beyond what readers may already know from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s famous Little House books. However, excessive repetition slows the novel down and dulls its effectiveness; for example, readers are informed many times over that Katrine’s typical chores are getting water and gathering wood. The prose can also be overly melodramatic at times (“Katrine’s heart caught”; “Katrine felt her world going black”; “A numbing ache filled Katrine”).
A historical novel with vivid descriptions of its time and place but that would have benefited from some streamlining.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5320-2006-3
Page Count: 414
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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