An engaging tale that powerfully evokes a time and place in American history.
A historical novel tells the stories of three young women in Michigan Territory with different challenges and goals.
Samantha Lockwood escapes her domineering family in the East, determined to make her own decisions about marriage. “A really good wife is almost always unhappy,” says her mother, in a peculiar attempt to buck her up. Samantha’s older brother runs a store and post office in Prairie du Chien. Day Sets, a Dakota woman with a White husband, wants a better life for her tribe and especially for her daughter, Mary. And Harriet Robinson, a Black enslaved person, wants her freedom. This is the 1830s in the upper Midwest along the Mississippi in what will become Wisconsin and Minnesota. The Native Americans are getting short shrift even as some try desperately to accommodate White men and even assimilate. Some of those White men are simply hateful and grasping (and their wives are no better). Others mean well but are inept or powerless. And although Harriet is living in a free territory, she is still an enslaved person. For just a little while, she feels as if she is free, but it will take years and lawsuits for that to happen, even after she marries Dred Scott (yes, that Dred Scott). Headstrong Samantha marries the feckless Alex Miree but eventually finds true love. Much of this story comes from Ulleseit’s own family history. Though there have been some liberties taken, the engrossing novel is largely true to that history and gets a lot of credit for being faithful to the time and place. What is immediately striking is the number of historical personages (Zachary Taylor, Jefferson Davis, artist George Catlin, Dred Scott) who make appearances. But the author assures readers that they all, in fact, visited that locale in that decade. All three women are strong and sympathetic characters, and Ulleseit provides copious and helpful backmatter. And running through the vivid story are reveries that reflect the timelessness that the title suggests.
An engaging tale that powerfully evokes a time and place in American history.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-64742-450-3
Page Count: 360
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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