First-novelist von Herzen's tale of an interracial friendship in early-20th-century rural Texas is based, in part, on oral history from the author's own forebears; and, indeed, there is a hearthside, grandmotherly, yarn-spinning rhythm to the telling of this story of tragedy and hardship, courage and love—all given a cosmic weight with ghosts slipping in and out. In Copper Crown, the color barrier was strong, the treatment of blacks by (poor) whites in general nakedly cruel. White Cassie and black Allie had to talk ``girl'' things in secret. Cassie, an ``almost bride'' at 15, had seen Murray, her husband-to-be, run off with cousin Lily Mark. But Murray and Lily Mark would leave Cassie a legacy—a fine horse and then, when doomed Lily Mark returned, the baby Ruby. It's with the horse and Ruby that Cassie and Allie finally leave the hell Copper Crown turned out to be—away from Cassie's sister's grave, Allie's dead brother, and the rows of innocent hanged black men. Eventually, the two will find work and home (of a kind) with brutal, stupid Mr. Skeet, owner of a ``dining house.'' Days are thin and hard, but with the friendship of a Mexican hired hand, they plant trees secretly, raise Ruby, save pennies. (Later, the dead Lily Mark appears, electric blue, from time to time, checking up on her child.) Finally, through chance and grim luck, the women own the restaurant. But then Warren, Allie's big husband, steps between them. Warren dislikes Cassie ``for her kind''; she dislikes him for ``seeing kinds instead of persons.'' There's a vicious killing, as well as the presumed end of a lifelong friendship, but at the close, hosts of the living and the dead—and soon-to-be dead—have a party. In a murmurous, intimate idiom, a moving tale of strength in terrible times, and a wise understanding of the power of ``person''-hood as opposed to ``kind''-hood.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1991
ISBN: 0-688-10688-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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