American Indians and colonial settlers struggle to understand each other in Virginia of 1700.
In just a few years, the Saponi Indian tribe has lost half of its people to war and the white man’s sickness. To make matters worse, it’s facing increasing pressure from more powerful Iroquois and Tuscarora raiders, and, of course, from the endless wave of European advancement. Unsure of how to meet these challenges, the Saponi chief sends his 13-year-old son, Kadomico, to school in Williamsburg, the capital of Virginia. This fast-paced work of historical fiction from Laird (Quail High Above the Shenandoah, 2006) then follows Kadomico and other Indian students as they learn more about the English, their “firesticks,” their “talking papers” and their religion. Meanwhile, Tuscarora raiders attack a defenseless Nahyssan village and capture a girl on whom Kadomico has a wild crush. Laird vividly describes daily life in 1700 for both colonists and Indians and peppers in some suspenseful fight scenes. Though generally well-researched, the book contains a few factual mistakes. Antelope, for example, never lived in the southeastern United States, and pheasants hadn’t yet been introduced. Some of the dialogue also comes across as wooden or hackneyed. “Horses act crazy, no good off-trail, no good in the river. Horses are no good,” an Indian warrior says at one point. Overall, though, Laird captures the spirit of the time. His characters, both Indian and white, are overwhelmingly brave, competent and interested in helping their fellow humans (not counting one group of drunken white yokels and the troublemaking Tuscarora). This is mostly a feel-good book. Laird hints at, but never goes into detail, about how the settlers eventually drove the Saponi and their neighbors practically to extinction. Perhaps that will come in the planned sequel. A worthwhile read that focuses on the daily lives of Indians and colonists rather than on famous historical events.
Pub Date: May 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-0982544327
Page Count: 363
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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