An inspiring, imaginative novelistic reconstruction of an obscure but harrowing episode in mid-century American history.
The infamous 1958 clash between the Lumbee Indians and the Ku Klux Klan is lightly fictionalized in Oxendine’s historical novel.
Cecil Lowery (sometimes spelled “Lowry”), a young Lumbee man, is at the center of that fateful day, Saturday, January 18, 1958. The novel opens with James “Catfish” Cole, preacher and Klan leader, announcing a Klan rally near Pembroke, North Carolina, that very night. The Lumbees, from southeastern North Carolina, are determined to stand up to him. At first, Cecil is on the fence about the whole thing and needs encouragement to join the confrontation: This he gets in spades from his father, tribal historian Clarence Edward Lowery; his grandfather, Danny Leach Lowery; and finally his great-grandmother, Nelia Ann “Polly” Lowery. They each recount for Cecil relevant tribal history, especially of how they fought to defend their homeland in the swamps, and their suffering under Jim Crow, where they have their own special race category (“whites, blacks, and Indians”). The Lumbees’ revered ancestor and symbol of defiance is Henry Berry Lowrie, an avenging Robin Hood figure who defied the Lumbees’ enemies and, for seven years, frustrated the white man’s attempt to bring him to justice before disappearing like smoke. In the end, “Catfish” Cole is met by an overwhelming force of Lumbees (armed with pistols, rifles, shotguns, knives, bush axes, pitchforks, and hoes), and the Klan is ignominiously routed at the Battle of Hayes Pond. The story is ultimately a paean to Lumbee courage and toughness and (as Grandpa Danny phrases it) their unity in the face of adversity. It’s sometimes difficult to grasp the essence of Cecil’s character, but on the whole, the author handles him well in that he’s presented as initially reticent but eventually embraces his inner warrior. The writing style is poetic and almost mystical as befits what is, in essence, a spiritual undertaking. Oxendine has taken upon himself the role of speaker for the tribe, and there are testimonials in the back of the book to support that. Today, the University of North Carolina at Pembroke itself is a testament to the tribe’s survival and success.
An inspiring, imaginative novelistic reconstruction of an obscure but harrowing episode in mid-century American history.Pub Date: April 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781300402022
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Lulu.com
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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