bookshelf

TWELVE QUIET MEN

Name: TWELVE QUIET MEN
Author: Michael Edward Little
ISBN: 978-1592995486

THE STORY OF THE COWBOY VIGILANTES KNOWN AS STUART'S STRANGLERS AT WAR WITH THE OUTLAWS OF MONTANA AND DAKOTA IN 1884

by Michael Edward Little ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 27, 2010

An ambitious but deeply flawed look at life in the American West.

bookshelf

Ranchers form a vigilante gang to run livestock thieves out of 1880s Montana.

The story begins with a gunshot, the first of hundreds that whiz through this action/adventure Western set on the plains of Montana and North Dakota in the twilight of the 19th century. In the first scene of the novel, a gang of livestock thieves kills a rancher at DHS Ranch, one of the largest cattle wrangling operations in the area. Fed up with the lack of law and order after being terrorized, the ranchers join together to take on the cattle thieves using any means necessary. The novel sweeps across the high plains, skipping from scenes of action to comedy. Little’s approach sets itself apart by including extensive regional histories, technical details and authentic depictions of ranch life. Despite the author’s admirable commitment to historical accuracy, these overly long sections cause the novel to grind to a halt, as if sections from a history essay and a how-to manual for ranchers have been inserted haphazardly into a Louis L’Amour novel. These parts reflect the author’s interests more than the demands of the story. More problematic, however, is the author’s shallow investigation of the moral implications of vigilantism. Though framed as righteous cowboys clearing the area of lawlessness, the moralistic raiders come off as bloodthirsty, not particularly appealing heroes willing to commit murder, arson, corpse mutilation and public intimidation to avenge crimes as minor as cattle theft and bootlegging. In effect, the novel trades emotional accuracy for technical accuracy, with brutal results.

An ambitious but deeply flawed look at life in the American West.

Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2010

ISBN: 978-1592995486

Page Count: 388

Publisher: Inkwater Press

Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2012

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION

bookshelf

THE CALAMITY CLUB

by Kathryn Stockett ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2026

Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.

bookshelf

Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.

This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.

Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.

Pub Date: May 5, 2026

ISBN: 9781954118812

Page Count: 656

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

bookshelf

THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

bookshelf

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.