This majestic novel will satisfy those thirsting for an epic saga of love, family, and the complexities of the American way.
A sweeping, cinematic story of love and family set against the dramatic backdrop of World War II and the American West.
“You can’t save what you don’t love.” That’s the first sentence of Wiggins' new novel and a leitmotif throughout the book—a love story, in the classic sense, as well as a love letter to an American West celebrated by Hollywood even as it was sucked dry by the city of Los Angeles. It's also a lesson in how Wiggins’ languid, linguistically lush and lyrical novel, set in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, found its way to completion. As the author’s daughter, photographer Lara Porzak, relays in an afterword, Wiggins was just a few chapters shy of completing the book when, in 2016, she suffered a massive stroke that affected her sequencing logic and short-term memory. Porzak worked from Wiggins’ notes and with a collaborator to help her mother complete the novel, saving it as a true labor of love. Given that painstaking process and the breathtaking beauty of the bulk of this novel, it would be ungrateful to gripe that the end doesn’t quite live up to the standard set by the previous chapters. To be sure, Wiggins set an extremely high bar. The book follows the experiences of several memorable characters, including Rockwell “Rocky” Rhodes, the scion of a wealthy East Coast railroad magnate, who has reinvented himself as a hardworking ranch man and impassioned preservationist; a Chicago-raised Jewish attorney named Schiff, who has been sent by the Department of the Interior to set up an internment camp for Japanese Americans in a desiccated former apple orchard adjacent to Rocky’s turf in Lone Pine, California; and Sunny, Rocky’s spirited daughter, a fiercely talented, mostly self-taught chef with whom Schiff falls in love. Wiggins’ interwoven plotlines—propelled here by romantic and there by familial love—and colorful characters are entrancing and as cinematic as the real-life Westerns that were filmed in the valley in which the book is primarily set. But what makes the novel soar is the way Wiggins can evoke landscapes both interior and exterior, especially the expansive valley that has come to exemplify America’s best qualities—and its worst.
This majestic novel will satisfy those thirsting for an epic saga of love, family, and the complexities of the American way.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7126-1
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
A captivating allegory about evil, lies, and forgiveness.
Truth and deception clash in this tale of the Holocaust.
Udo Graf is proud that the Wolf has assigned him the task of expelling all 50,000 Jews from Salonika, Greece. In that city, Nico Krispis is an 11-year-old Jewish boy whose blue eyes and blond hair deceive, but whose words do not. Those who know him know he has never told a lie in his life—“Never be the one to tell lies, Nico,” his grandfather teaches him. “God is always watching.” Udo and Nico meet, and Udo decides to exploit the child’s innocence. At the train station where Jews are being jammed into cattle cars bound for Auschwitz, Udo gives Nico a yellow star to wear and persuades him to whisper among the crowd, “I heard it from a German officer. They are sending us to Poland. We will have new homes. And jobs.” The lad doesn’t know any better, so he helps persuade reluctant Jews to board the train to hell. “You were a good little liar,” Udo later tells Nico, and delights in the prospect of breaking the boy’s spirit, which is more fun and a greater challenge than killing him outright. When Nico realizes the horrific nature of what he's done, his truth-telling days are over. He becomes an inveterate liar about everything. Narrating the story is the Angel of Truth, whom according to a parable God had cast out of heaven and onto earth, where Truth shattered into billions of pieces, each to lodge in a human heart. (Obviously, many hearts have been missed.) Truth skillfully weaves together the characters, including Nico; his brother, Sebastian; Sebastian’s wife, Fannie; and the “heartless deceiver” Udo. Events extend for decades beyond World War II, until everyone’s lives finally collide in dramatic fashion. As Truth readily acknowledges, his account is loaded with twists and turns, some fortuitous and others not. Will Nico Krispis ever seek redemption? And will he find it? Author Albom’s passion shows through on every page in this well-crafted novel.
A captivating allegory about evil, lies, and forgiveness.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780062406651
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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