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
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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