A spirited debut that should satisfy fans of both sports and historical YA fiction.
A coming-of-age tale of a Onondaga youth applying the ancient lessons of lacrosse to the strictures of reservation life in turn-of-the-century New York state.
Celeste’s debut novel begins with an in-depth first-person account of Pontiac’s uprising of 1763, wherein Pontiac explains both the importance of lacrosse, or Bagadowe, as a rite of manhood and the existence of a prophecy that tells of an eagle, carrying a bloody stick, that will one day drive the Europeans from America. The story then jumps to the Onondaga reservation south of Syracuse in 1909, where the tale is taken up by Fallen Tree, a descendent of Pontiac and grandfather of the novel’s protagonist, Jake Harwood. Jake’s is a very different era for Native Americans than that of his famous ancestor: one of shrunken lands, poverty, Christian missionaries and Bureau of Indian Affairs agents. Jake, reared on the traditions of Bagadowe and Native resistance, must navigate school, love and social rivalries, learning to be both a Native American and a man. Ending in a cliffhanger, the book is the first volume of a duology; the sequel will detail Jake’s life at the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians. The strong, efficient prose keeps the tone of the work serious but not unsmiling, and native issues add interest to this action-heavy YA novel. Celeste has a talent for fashioning the sports sequences that lie at the story’s center. Lacrosse doesn’t feel merely symbolic; it’s imbued with a vitality that makes the scenes dance. Celeste shows a community simultaneously decadent and triumphant, bastardized and dynamic. These traits coexist in Jake himself, who proves a multilayered (if familiar) hero for this formative tale. Though many forces, present and past, weigh upon Jake’s sense of responsibility, he reads as a full enough character to make the reader believe that Jake will, in time, figure things out for himself.
A spirited debut that should satisfy fans of both sports and historical YA fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494291426
Page Count: 380
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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