A well-wrought, moving saga of reservation life in the throes of change that feels both painful and exhilarating.
A Navajo Indian veteran of World War II—part of the famous “code talkers” unit—feels torn between tradition and the white man’s world in this absorbing tale of fractured identities.
Frustrated with his aimless life on an economically depressed Arizona reservation, 28-year-old Jimmie Goodluck signs up with the Marine Corps in 1942 and gets slotted into an all-Navajo platoon. Already toughened by hardscrabble desert life, the Navajo recruits thrive in the military, one of the few American institutions that treats them with respect (except when they’re mistaken for Japanese spies). They’re especially valued because of their assignment to develop a code based on the Navajo language, virtually impossible to decipher, for rapid radio communications. In an earnestly gung-ho but rather sketchy narrative, the war takes Jimmie and his comrades from Guadalcanal to the bloodbath at Iwo Jima. His story deepens when he comes home in 1946, horizons expanded, to a reservation where little seems to have changed: Jobs are scarce, poverty deep, racism ubiquitous and government callous. (The uncompensated slaughter of Navajo livestock to prevent overgrazing is a particular sore point.) During peyote rituals, he sees mystic visions that seem to endorse his father’s bitter suspicion of the white man. Yet Jimmie is also drawn to other forces, including a progressive family of tribal leaders and the fetching sister of a slain comrade who wants to help her people in thoroughly modern ways. Stillman (A Match Made in Hell, 2005) paints a rich portrait of Navajo life with an impressive depth and detail, steeping the reader in vibrant folkways and grand, austere landscapes. But he also portrays a backward-looking, claustrophobic society seething with ancient vendettas that shape and limit his characters. The subtle, sensitive prose captures the psychological complexity of the people who live there as they walk a tightrope bridge between a warm but fading past and a future of hope and uncertainty.
A well-wrought, moving saga of reservation life in the throes of change that feels both painful and exhilarating.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475955545
Page Count: 376
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2012
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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