Terrific adventures. Splendid details.
Intrepid early Victorians trek the American desert to photograph a total eclipse.
Historical novelist Byrd sets the presidential series (Jackson, 1997; Grant, 2000) aside to apply his formidable research skills to an inventive tale, set in 1840, of scientists and capitalists in search of wealth and knowledge in the godforsaken outback of beyond. American-born, French-reared Selena Cott is the pure scientist in an odd party that includes a weasely Harvard mathematician, a greedy insurance magnate, a vegetarian frontiersman, and a charming artist, all of them assembled to cross the continent from Washington to New Mexico in search of, among other things, the eclipsed sun. Selena is a math whiz, a protégé of astronomer Mary Somerville, and a beauty whose sea captain father taught her to tackle anything and fear nothing. Skilled in the art of daguerrotypography, Selena plans to take the first pictures of the rare celestial event, best seen in unfriendly and unmapped territory on the far side of the Texas Republic. In her tool trunk ticks the very latest and best chronometer, absolutely necessary to hit the longitudinal mark in the featureless desert. She is also armed with the portable model of inventor Charles Babbage’s fabulous proto-computer. It is the computer rather than the celestial event that motivates financially strapped insurance man William Henshaw Pryce. Pryce’s grasp of the possibilities of the computer has sent him in search of capital for its development. Successful use of the machine to locate the solar event would attract millions. That is, at any rate, his public story. Frontier guide and early health-nut Webb Pattie joins the scientific expedition in Missouri and steers their train of spanking new Conestoga wagons west on the Santa Fe Trail. There are the expected adventures, deprivations, Indian encounters and conflicts, but there is also unexpected skullduggery having to do with Charles Babbage’s immensely wealthy and reclusive Uncle Richard, who’s in sequestered residence with the Kiowa tribe strangely near the astronometrical destination.
Terrific adventures. Splendid details.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-553-80208-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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