A gripping and historically rigorous account of a harsh America.
A historical novel follows the intersecting lives of three troubled travelers hunting redemption in the Alaska Gold Rush.
In 1897, the prospect of quickly acquired wealth drew both adventurous and desperate sorts to Alaska in search of gold. But others were driven by the desire to escape their former lives and reinvent themselves anew. Kaplan (Over the Edge, 2006) chronicles three such self-exiles whose lives improbably but serendipitously intersect. Maggie Saunders is a prostitute working at a brothel in St. Louis, carefully stashing away money to eventually go out on her own. But a physically imposing customer brutalizes her, leaving her for dead. Maggie helps herself to an involuntary gratuity from his purse of gold, and when he finds out, he attacks her savagely. She defends herself with a stiletto knife, inadvertently killing him. She disguises herself as a young man and furtively hops a train out of town. Meanwhile, Jared Monroe plans to dash his father’s designs for him to earn a doctorate of divinity from Yale and rejoin the family farming business. But his father and brothers all rebuff his return dismissively—one of the brothers beats him to the precipice of death. Jared, too, hops a westward train to start fresh with his loving dog, Brutus. And Alex Stromberg is the son of a successful San Francisco merchant, Mordecai, who constantly squashes the young man’s entrepreneurial dreams. Alex kills a man in a bar fight and is forced to flee San Francisco in order to elude a plot to exact revenge upon him. All three end up in Skagway, Alaska, their lives financially and emotionally intertwined. Kaplan cleverly collapses the three parallel stories into one coherent narrative, at first by sheer happenstance and then by shared existential purpose. His prose is simple and largely unadorned by literary embellishment, but that straightforwardness is the chief source of its resonance. For example, an old man succinctly captures Jared’s despair at the world’s nihilistic inhumanity: “Ain’t no right or wrong...You get away with what you can get away with. That’s the law of the Yukon.” The drama is briskly paced, with no deficit of spectacular violence and suspense. But the author’s true gift is for vividly revealing the way sparks of goodness strain to light an otherwise morally dark landscape. The combination of avarice and desolation is harrowingly depicted. Furthermore, the author’s historical research is impeccable. His meticulous descriptions of otherwise minor details—the geography, the supplies needed for a gold expedition, the currency of exchange—color the work with an aura of authenticity. The United States more than a century ago is nearly unrecognizable to contemporary eyes, still so unexplored and ungoverned by stable laws. Kaplan expertly portrays this strange cosmos, so foreign and yet so unmistakably American. The torrid action alone turns this into a worthwhile read, but the historical accuracy makes the book worthy of an unabashed recommendation.
A gripping and historically rigorous account of a harsh America.Pub Date: May 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5320-1479-6
Page Count: 413
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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
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