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
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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