An atmospheric magical-realist tale with a compellingly ominous interpretation of the gold rush.
A young woman embarks on a quest to hold off Yankee gold miners in this alternate-history YA novel.
When three strangers ride into the rancho of Don Ygnacio Delgado in Alta California, they bring alarming news. It’s June 1846, and Yankees—called Bear Flaggers for their makeshift, grizzly-bear standard—have captured Gen. Mariano Vallejo and claimed the whole territory for the United States. The raiders also killed the brother of Tomás Tomás, the older rider, as well as three Delgado family friends. Tomás, who is Costanoan, has another shock for 16-year-old Catalina Delgado; she is his granddaughter. Her real mother, now dead, was named Rain Falling, and Catalina is a mestiza, not pure gente de razón. This newfound status could lower her prospects of marriage to her beloved Ángelo Ortega, a match already in danger from a prophecy that a Spirit Man will come and take her away. In a world where Catalina is locked into her bedroom every night to protect her reputation, Ángelo’s father will insist on a girl of unblemished chastity. Now, Tomás relates Rain Falling’s childhood dream, in which a prophetic spiritual figure called Coyote said that her daughter would be stolen, to be returned when she hides a gold strike. This will be heralded by three signs—a false bear flag, a murdered brother, and a man on a black Andalusian stallion riding a thunder cloud. On his black horse, Spirit Man does come to Catalina. He shows her gold nuggets in a stream and a hiding place, Spirit Waker Cave, although the inevitable “plague of two-legged flies” that will transform Alta California can only be postponed. Catalina, too, as well as her hopes and dreams, will be forever changed by her challenging new destiny.
In her second YA novel that’s set in a magical-realist 19th-century California, Hill gives readers a wonderfully imaginative, unsettling view of events leading up to the 1849 gold rush. Many narratives emphasize the excitement of this time and California’s newfound wealth, population growth, and influence, but this book foreshadows the disasters—starvation, slaughter, dispossession—inflicted on Indigenous people. It’s a theme that could become heavy-handed, but Catalina’s passionate teenage energy gives propulsion to the dramatic plot. She’s caught up in a whirlwind of romantic hopes; her fear of the mysterious, ambiguous Spirit Man and his nameless horse; the weightiness of her task; and spiritual questioning. Although multiple prophecies and spiritual forces push Catalina on her transformative journey, the urgency doesn’t seem warranted given that her efforts will have very limited effect and duration. It’s hinted that her alteration will help connect loved ones, but that seems unrelated to the gold question. Still, typical teenager-with-a-quest stories end in shiny triumph (even if losses occur along the way), and Hill does well to take the story beyond that trope in unexpected directions that show the depth of Catalina’s sacrifice and love.
An atmospheric magical-realist tale with a compellingly ominous interpretation of the gold rush.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-949534-20-7
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Sand Hill Review Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Like the house at its center, a book that is multitudinous and magical.
The story of a house, the humans who inhabit it, the ghosts who haunt it, and the New England forest encompassing them all.
In the opening chapter of the fourth novel by Mason—a Pulitzer Prize finalist for A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (2020)—a pair of rebellious young lovers flee their Puritan Massachusetts village to seek refuge in the “north woods”: “They were Nature’s wards now, he told her, they had crossed into a Realm.” Readers, too, will find themselves in an entrancing fictional realm where the human, natural, and supernatural mingle, all captured in the author’s effortlessly virtuosic prose. Across the centuries, the cabin built by those lovers will transform and house a host of characters, among them Charles Osgood, a British colonist who establishes an apple orchard there; Osgood’s twin daughters, Alice and Mary, whose mutual spinsterhood conceals a bitter jealousy; and Karl Farnsworth, an avid hunter who sees the land as a “sportsman’s paradise” in which to open a private lodge (he hopes to host Teddy Roosevelt despite the “vile” sounds his distraught wife hears in the old structure). Many chapters read like found historical documents, including one side of the correspondence between painter William Henry Teale and his friend Erasmus Nash, a poet, whose visit to the north woods house will have an unexpected impact on both their lives—and those of future inhabitants. Elsewhere we find “Case Notes on Robert S.,” in which a psychiatrist pays a house call to a resident suffering from possible schizophrenia and given to auditory hallucinations while wandering the forest; and “Murder Most Cold,” a dispatch by TRUE CRIME! columnist Jack Dunne, summoned from New York to look into a gory death on the property. Throughout, this loose and limber novel explores themes of illicit desire, madness, the occult, the palimpsest of human history, and the inexorable workings of the natural world (a passage recounting the fateful mating of an elm bark beetle is unforgettable), all handled with a touch that is light and sure.
Like the house at its center, a book that is multitudinous and magical.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780593597033
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A masterly encapsulation of modern Russian history, this book more than fulfills the promise of Towles' stylish debut, Rules...
Sentenced to house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel by a Bolshevik tribunal for writing a poem deemed to encourage revolt, Count Alexander Rostov nonetheless lives the fullest of lives, discovering the depths of his humanity.
Inside the elegant Metropol, located near the Kremlin and the Bolshoi, the Count slowly adjusts to circumstances as a "Former Person." He makes do with the attic room, to which he is banished after residing for years in a posh third-floor suite. A man of refined taste in wine, food, and literature, he strives to maintain a daily routine, exploring the nooks and crannies of the hotel, bonding with staff, accepting the advances of attractive women, and forming what proves to be a deeply meaningful relationship with a spirited young girl, Nina. "We are bound to find comfort from the notion that it takes generations for a way of life to fade," says the companionable narrator. For the Count, that way of life ultimately becomes less about aristocratic airs and privilege than generosity and devotion. Spread across four decades, this is in all ways a great novel, a nonstop pleasure brimming with charm, personal wisdom, and philosophic insight. Though Stalin and Khrushchev make their presences felt, Towles largely treats politics as a dark, distant shadow. The chill of the political events occurring outside the Metropol is certainly felt, but for the Count and his friends, the passage of time is "like the turn of a kaleidoscope." Not for nothing is Casablanca his favorite film. This is a book in which the cruelties of the age can't begin to erase the glories of real human connection and the memories it leaves behind.
A masterly encapsulation of modern Russian history, this book more than fulfills the promise of Towles' stylish debut, Rules of Civility(2011).Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-670-02619-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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