A historically informative tale of survival.
Smathers’ historical novel chronicles the tragedies and triumphs of a courageous Californio woman whose family rancho is sold to a vengeful “yanqui.”
It is 1850, and California is in the midst of vast changes since its acquisition by the United States. Gold prospectors have flooded the area, and Americans are gobbling up the ranchos owned for many generations by the Californios (Hispanic people born and raised in California when it was a part of Mexico). Two years earlier, Juanita Castro de la Cruz sold the once-grand Rancho Castro to Malachy Brennan, a ranch hand who left her pregnant years before. To protect her family from potential reprisals from Malachy’s wife—who, she fears, may discover Malachy is the father of Juanita’s 15-year-old son, Joaquin—Juanita found husbands for her two younger sisters and sent Joaquin off to find work at the gold mines. For two years, she has remained working at the rancho and caring for her widowed mother. After her mother dies, Juanita flees in the middle of the night on Malachy’s favorite horse, Canela. She is determined to find her son and rides to her sister’s house hoping for help, but the reunion is acrimonious. Guilty and desperate, she heads to San Francisco armed with a cache of her sister and brother-in-law’s possessions to sell. She purchases a mule train and begins her journey as a lone muleteer, following the trails from gold mine to gold mine in search of Joaquin. Smathers packs her complex melodrama with tragedy, hair-raising danger, and stunning successes. Juanita’s saga continues for more than 20 years as she builds, loses, and rebuilds her fortune. The novel provides a poignant, vivid depiction of the prejudices that threatened the Californios, who were already enduring the loss of their land. The descriptions of conditions in the cold, wet mining camps are stingingly painful (“There are no buildings, just canvas tents and mud and more mud”) as both gold reserves and hope peter out. Peppered with the diverse linguistics and culture clashes of the era, the narrative is an engaging portrayal of the period, and Juanita is a formidable, independent female lead.
A historically informative tale of survival.Pub Date: May 3, 2025
ISBN: 9798990674509
Page Count: 382
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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