Old Keb understands it “used to be hard to live and easy to die. Not anymore.”
Part quest, part rebirth, Heacox’s debut novel spins a story of Alaska’s Tlingit people and the land, an old man dying, and a young man learning to live.
In the town of Jinkaat, off Icy Strait near Crystal Bay, Old Keb Wisting, 95, all "big ears, small bladder, bad teeth" but diamond-clear in soul, wants to bring meaning to the life of his grandson James, “prisoner of angr” a deeply felt grief. Basketball wizard James ruined his knee in a logging accident, and Old Keb decides that the two of them will carve a cedar canoe. Canoe completed—christened Óoxjaa Yadéi, or Against the Wind—Keb, with James and two friends, begins a spirit journey to Crystal Bay, heartland of the Tlingit people. Heacox’s characters resonate, each immersed in the Pacific Northwest’s great watery woods. Old Keb, part Norwegian, part Tlingit, is the last of the Tlingit cedar carvers. There’s also James’ mother, Gracie, who “could bend [Keb] with a smile.” Keb’s “kittiwake daughter,” Ruby, is a professor, all pride and passion. Little Mac, James’ Chinese-Tlingit-Scots girlfriend, has a tiny body, towering intellect, and tremendous empathy. Large Marge, “a wide-hipped buxomed fisherwoman,” captains the Silverbow with two deaf sons. Keb’s dead uncle Austin speaks in dreams as Raven, the trickster. Add politicians, bureaucrats, media types, all circling, making demands, as Keb and the others set out for Crystal Bay, now a federal reserve and a place mired in conflict with the development interests of PacAlaska, a Native American corporation. It’s Heacox’s language, however, and his deep appreciation of the land, the sea, and the Tlingit, “a liquid people,” that illuminate the story, one with an ending logical and unsentimental yet emotionally satisfying.
Old Keb understands it “used to be hard to live and easy to die. Not anymore.”Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941821-68-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Alaska Northwest Books
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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