Compassionate and insightful, authentic and poignant.
The infamous frontier woman Calamity Jane stumbles into the role of surrogate mother for two orphaned youngsters.
There’s a smallpox epidemic around Deadwood, South Dakota. From a canvas-sided cabin "in the gulch near the creek," 12-year-old Jimmy Glass loads his pox-stricken father into a ramshackle wagon and pulls him into town, bringing his little sister, Flower, along. There, the youngsters meet Calamity Jane, who has them carry their father to the “pest tent.” Jane then installs the children in her own room at Dora DuFran’s bar, restaurant, and house of ill repute. As much as this is historical fiction (several characters are real persons reimagined) and a coming-of-age story, it’s primarily an attempt to humanize the outsize legend of Calamity Jane, a woman who's pugnacious, vulgar, and a touch feminist. That summer, the year of Jane’s lover Wild Bill Hickok’s death, Jane can be found at “at the pest tent, passed out drunk by the outhouse, or drinking at Dora’s saloon.” Jimmy sees the real Jane and knows she shares his worry over the fragile Flower, his half Lakota sister, whom he calls “mine to care for, mine to watch over.” Flower seems to have autism: "She talks to me, but normally doesn't with other people," Jimmy tells Jane. "She don't much like lookin' at people, either." Amid the Deadwood dangers, Jimmy, already capable, grows in emotional maturity as well, finding love among Diddlin’ Dora’s ladies in the wise soul of teenage Missy, who always smelled of cinnamon. Set against the background of rough-and-tumble Deadwood, probing the legend of Calamity Jane to discover the true heroic frontier woman, Rene's (I Once Knew Vincent, 2014) focused narrative never strays from its themes.
Compassionate and insightful, authentic and poignant.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-944995-49-2
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Amberjack Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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