Texan pioneers fight a war of stealth and slaughter against Comanche raiders in this gripping adventure.
With the Confederacy collapsing around them, 14-year-old Tom McKlarren, his mother, Kathryn, and baby sister, Mattie, and their devoted ex-slave, William, set off from Galveston to his Aunt Mollie’s ranch near Waco, hoping for refuge from the anarchy, hyperinflation and bushwhackers that roil the dying rebellion. (Mindful of her civilizing mission, Kathryn hauls an enormous piano along in their mule-drawn wagon.) Alas, the isolated homesteads on the Texas frontier are a source of even greater peril: Comanche Indians—superb horsemen, trackers and guerilla fighters bent on driving the white man from their hunting grounds. When a war party massacres a local family and abducts Kathryn along with Tom’s sweetheart, Sara, he sets out alone on a hopeless quest to rescue the women-folk from a fate worse than death. Fortunately, he meets up with Raifford MacReynolds, a legendary Texas Ranger who comes equipped with decades of Indian-fighting experience, courtly manners and the awesome firepower of his newfangled Henry repeating rifle and long-range Whitworth sniper’s gun. The author serves up well-crafted prose and sharply etched characters in this frontier yarn, complete with fancy shootin’ and ridin’, colorfully terse palaver, untarnished heroism and a ballast of gritty violence. (He doesn’t shy away from the settlers’ period-authentic hatred of Indians, but balances it with a noble, complex Indian scout.) Morris also delivers an engrossing historical novel that steeps readers in the atmospherics of pioneer life and the details of brush-clearing, livestock-tending, food-frying and store-bartering. It’s a bit of a sprawl, but at its center is a fine action odyssey set in the oceanic plains, where there’s no cover from pitiless eyes and survival is a nerve-wracking chess game that requires subtle strategizing, encyclopedic knowledge of horses, cattle, weather and terrain and the ability to read the slightest ripple of dust on a menacing horizon. A vivid, rousing, old-school western.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1451519204
Page Count: 494
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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While a few weeks ago it seemed as if Praeger would have a two month lead over Dutton in their presentation of this Soviet best seller, both the "authorized" edition (Dutton's) and the "unauthorized" (Praeger's) will appear almost simultaneously. There has been considerable advance attention on what appears to be as much of a publishing cause celebre here as the original appearance of the book in Russia. Without entering into the scrimmage, or dismissing it as a plague on both your houses, we will limit ourselves to a few facts. Royalties from the "unauthorized" edition will go to the International Rescue Committee; Dutton with their contracted edition is adhering to copyright conventions. The Praeger edition has two translators and one of them is the translator of Doctor Zhivago Dutton's translator, Ralph Parker, has been stigmatized by Praeger as "an apologist for the Soviet regime". To the untutored eye, the Dutton translation seems a little more literary, the Praeger perhaps closer to the rather primitive style of the original. The book itself is an account of one day in the three thousand six hundred and fifty three days of the sentence to be served by a carpenter, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. (Solzhenitsyn was a political prisoner.) From the unrelenting cold without, to the conditions within, from the bathhouse to the latrine to the cells where survival for more than two weeks is impossible, this records the hopeless facts of existence as faced by thousands who went on "living like this, with your eyes on the ground". The Dutton edition has an excellent introduction providing an orientation on the political background to its appearance in Russia by Marvin Kalb. All involved in its publication (translators, introducers, etc.) claim for it great "artistic" values which we cannot share, although there is no question of its importance as a political and human document and as significant and tangible evidence of the de-Stalinization program.
Pub Date: June 15, 1963
ISBN: 0451228146
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Praeger
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1963
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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A middle-aged woman returns to her childhood home to care for her ailing father, confronting many painful secrets from her past.
When Mallory Aldiss gets a call from a long-ago boyfriend telling her that her elderly father has been gallivanting around town with a gun in his hand, Mallory decides it’s time to return to the small Rhode Island town that she’s been avoiding for more than a decade. Mallory’s precocious 13-year-old daughter, Joy, is thrilled that she'll get to meet her grandfather at long last, and an aunt, too, and she'll finally see the place where her mother grew up. When they arrive in Bay Bluff, it’s barely a few hours before Mallory bumps into her old flame, Jack, the only man she’s ever really loved. Gone is the rebellious young person she remembers, and in his place stands a compassionate, accomplished adult. As they try to reconnect, Mallory realizes that the same obstacle that pushed them apart decades earlier is still standing in their way: Jack blames Mallory’s father for his mother’s death. No one knows exactly how Jack’s mother died, but Jack thinks a love affair between her and Mallory’s father had something to do with it. As Jack and Mallory chase down answers, Mallory also tries to repair her rocky relationships with her two sisters and determine why her father has always been so hard on her. Told entirely from Mallory’s perspective, the novel has a haunting, nostalgic quality. Despite the complex and overlapping layers to the history of Bay Bluff and its inhabitants, the book at times trudges too slowly through Mallory’s meanderings down Memory Lane. Even so, Delinsky sometimes manages to pick up the pace, and in those moments the beauty and nuance of this complicated family tale shine through. Readers who don’t mind skimming past details that do little to advance the plot may find that the juicier nuggets and realistically rendered human connections are worth the effort.
A touching family drama that effectively explores the negative impact of stress on fragile relationships.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-11951-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
Categories: FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION
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