On the English frontier in 17th-century American, a short walk in the woods turns into a months-long nightmare for a newly settled mother and her young daughter when they lose their way, as first- novelist Youmans brings keen insight and a relentless focus to one woman's suffering and sorrow. In 1676, having survived a tempest at sea, Catherwood and gentleman husband Gabriel, originally destined with a group of kin for Virginia, find New York's wilderness to their liking and obtain land in the Albany region. A busy round of clearing, planting, and building ensues, so that before two years pass a substantial house and gardens have been hewn out of the woods—and Cath has a one- year-old, Elizabeth, to share her days. The idyll is shattered one afternoon in May, however, when Cath misses the trail home after visiting a nearby cousin, and she and Elizabeth wander ever farther away from home while desperately searching for some sign of civilization. A knowledge of herb lore and the presence in her pack of flint, steel, and a knife keep away hunger and cold, but as spring gives way to summer, and summer to fall without any alteration in their fortunes, survival becomes less certain. Elizabeth catches a fever and dies, leaving her mother so bereft that she cannot leave her body behind. Cremating the child allows Cath to carry away a few bones, but her own mental and physical state swiftly deteriorates. In her final despair she stumbles at last on a settlement (Westfield, Mass.), where she collapses and is nursed slowly to health. The Puritans keep apart from her as a nonbeliever, but send for Gabriel at her request, and as winter arrives he appears to take her home. The tender moments between mother and child are evoked most powerfully, but the farther one moves from this intimate sphere, the less satisfying the novel becomes.
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-374-11972-4
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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