31286676.399 Estleman, Loren D. THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN MOVING PICTURE ASSOCIATION Estleman has switched fictional settings before from Prohibition Detroit (Whiskey River, 1990, etc.) to the Hollywood of early silents, as in Billy Gashade (1997). His latest, set largely in 1913, is something of a sequel to Billy. Burgeoning but unpublished young writer Dmitri Andreivitch Pulski, who admires Jack London and writes under the pen name Tom Boston, has garnered 172 rejections and, waiting for his ship to come in, works for his father, who owns the Sierra Nevada Ice Company. One day after he’s just helped cut up eight tons of ice from a frozen lake, a request comes in from a Hollywood studio for ten tons of same. His father sends Tom/Dmitri down to Hollywood to check on the deal. Tom’s romantic interest is exotic blossom Adele Varga, the secretary/leading lady for director Buck Bensinger, whose Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association is shooting The Trail of “98, the Alaskan gold rush tale that made all that ice necessary. When Tom says he’s a writer and that Jack London will undoubtedly sue Buck for lifting his plot, Buck hires Tom to sponge all the Jack London out of the script. Meanwhile, the sheriff threatens to put Buck’s equipment on the auction block if he doesn’t pay off a printer. On his new job, Tom the innocent wanders about the set with Adele, while Estleman packs in sparkling filler. A leap ahead to 1927 tells of Tom/Pulski’s visit as a big-time realtor to Hearst’s castle at San Simeon; then it’s back to 1913 and Buck’s fight against the Edison Trust. When his leading cowboy star dies on heroin, Buck hires a famous desperado just released from San Quentin to replace him. Buck takes to drink; Adele turns producer and makes a star of desperado J. W. Starling. Jump to 1948 for a nostalgic recap. Masterful description floats through a story that’s held together by sheer charm.
Pub Date: April 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-86676-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
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Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
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Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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