In the broad shadow of Johnny Appleseed, this lumberjack's adventures captivate.
Irascible Weldon Applegate, 99 years old "but still I was in my prime," relives his tumultuous days as an orphan among hard-bitten lumberjacks in this free-wheeling folktale by singer/songwriter Ritter.
The novel is set in the Idaho town of Cordelia, where Weldon's widowed father, part of a famous family of "jacks," came to run a general store and raise his son. Ignoring the Witch, a Finnish fortuneteller who says he'll die if he returns to jacking, he meets his maker in the form of "two hundred feet of white pine in [his] face." Inheriting the Lost Lot, a treacherous stretch of forest that Weldon's grandfather won in a card game, the 13-year-old boy becomes a thorn in the side of 7-foot terror Linden Laughlin, who wants it for himself. Though Laughlin is known as "the best jack that had ever lived," his co-workers have a way of dying in suspicious accidents. Will young Weldon be next? Spanning Prohibition, the Great Depression, World War II, and the dreaded modern world of flat-screen TVs, Ritter's follow-up to Bright's Passage (2011) is a scenic, phrase-spinning account that delights in detailing the perilous life of a lumberjack—the difficulty, for example, of getting gigantic trees to fall right and the daunting odds against transporting these "monster logs" to the river bank via a rickety chute. Even accepting the exaggerated reality of a yarn like this, it's not always easy to believe a 13-year-old could do and say the things Weldon does. And a framing story involving a calculating frenemy of the aged protagonist bogs down. But like the song without an ending that one character after another can't get out of their head, the novel has its own infectious quality.
In the broad shadow of Johnny Appleseed, this lumberjack's adventures captivate.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-335-52253-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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