A transformative tale of personal reinvention from a masterful storyteller.
In Huffman’s novel, a young man unwittingly endangers himself and his friends as they retrace a relative’s journey through Utah taken the previous century.
The novel explores two moments in a family’s history, taking place 112 years apart, both concluding in violence. Their convergence point is a young man named Tom Sullivan, who, in the early 1980s, works at a sporting goods store in Golden, Colorado, and hangs out with a salesman and Vietnam veteran named Jack Elmore, drinking in Jack’s garage. Jack has another friend he looks in on, the more opaque and laconic Frank, also a Vietnam vet. The men are paid a visit by Susan Kingsley, an acquisitions assistant specialist at the Smithsonian Museum, and by her ex-husband, Andrew Harrison, an unfaithful and ill-tempered junior FBI agent jealous that Susan’s career’s star might ascend before his. Susan’s on the trail of some letters that might shed light on how Mormons and Native Americans procured the rifles that were used in a massacre of over 100 emigrant travelers journeying through Mormon country in 1879. Those original letters have just been sent to their rightful heir: Tom. As Tom, Jack, and Frank head off on a fishing trip in which they also seek the homestead of William Mitchell, the writer of the letters, Susan follows in their wake, in search of history. And Andrew follows her, in search of revenge for the pall their divorce has cast over his job. In the retelling of William Mitchell’s covered wagon journey to Utah, frontier violence is a way of life; in the late 20th century, the violence is personal. The closing third of the novel ramps up the suspense in both timelines, conveyed in gorgeous prose and featuring rich character development. Both stories’ conclusions are emotionally affecting and unexpected. This irresistible novel manages the curious trick of making the reader want to stand up and cheer when a woman rides up on horseback in the middle of nowhere and says, “Afternoon, gentlemen. I’m Susan Kingsley with the Smithsonian Museum.”
A transformative tale of personal reinvention from a masterful storyteller.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9798988861300
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If it’s possible for America to have a poet laureate, why can’t James McBride be its storyteller-in-chief?
McBride follows up his hit novel Deacon King Kong (2020) with another boisterous hymn to community, mercy, and karmic justice.
It's June 1972, and the Pennsylvania State Police have some questions concerning a skeleton found at the bottom of an old well in the ramshackle Chicken Hill section of Pottstown that’s been marked for redevelopment. But Hurricane Agnes intervenes by washing away the skeleton and all other physical evidence of a series of extraordinary events that began more than 40 years earlier, when Jewish and African American citizens shared lives, hopes, and heartbreak in that same neighborhood. At the literal and figurative heart of these events is Chona Ludlow, the forbearing, compassionate Jewish proprietor of the novel’s eponymous grocery store, whose instinctive kindness and fairness toward the Black families of Chicken Hill exceed even that of her husband, Moshe, who, with Chona’s encouragement, desegregates his theater to allow his Black neighbors to fully enjoy acts like Chick Webb’s swing orchestra. Many local White Christians frown upon the easygoing relationship between Jews and Blacks, especially Doc Roberts, Pottstown’s leading physician, who marches every year in the local Ku Klux Klan parade. The ties binding the Ludlows to their Black neighbors become even stronger over the years, but that bond is tested most stringently and perilously when Chona helps Nate Timblin, a taciturn Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of his community, conceal and protect a young orphan named Dodo who lost his hearing in an explosion. He isn’t at all “feeble-minded,” but the government wants to put him in an institution promising little care and much abuse. The interlocking destinies of these and other characters make for tense, absorbing drama and, at times, warm, humane comedy. McBride’s well-established skill with narrative tactics may sometimes spill toward the melodramatic here. But as in McBride’s previous works, you barely notice such relatively minor contrivances because of the depth of characterizations and the pitch-perfect dialogue of his Black and Jewish characters. It’s possible to draw a clear, straight line from McBride’s breakthrough memoir, The Color of Water (1996), to the themes of this latest work.
If it’s possible for America to have a poet laureate, why can’t James McBride be its storyteller-in-chief?Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9780593422946
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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