Sven’s ugliness is only skin-deep, and readers will love the beauty and depth of his story.
A Swedish trapper relates his unique life with insights about friendship, hardship, and solitude.
Sven Ormson lives in a tiny cabin in Spitsbergen, a Scandinavian island with precious little between it and the North Pole. In 1917, he’d suffered grotesque injury to his face in a mining avalanche and acquired one of his nicknames, Sven One-Eye. Some turn away from the sight of him in disgust, though he has a circle of friends and family. “I resolved to spend my life alone,” he writes. So he’s drawn to the monastic life of a trapper and appears content with books, correspondence with his sister, Olga, and the occasional company of folks like the Scotsman Charles MacIntyre, who sees in Sven a “fellow bibliophile” perhaps “in need of a friend.” So Sven is seldom alone for long stretches. He is self-deprecating about “the topographic eccentricities” of his face that to some were a “nauseous curiosity.” But he seems not terribly bothered by it or by the fact that some call him Sven the Seal Fucker. “You look like a bear chewed you up and shat you out,” he’s told. “You were never very handsome to begin with.” Fortunately, he disdains pity, “the only thing worse than flagrant antagonism.” And he’s modest about his skills: “I trapped with something that outshone total incompetence,” sometimes proceeding “tentatively like an old lady upon cobblestones.” The arctic climes must breed self-reliance and toughness, which are evident even in Sven’s two dogs, memorable characters themselves. His first canine, Eberhard, is “a fractious, willful brute” that is sometimes his only companion. Meanwhile, Europe convulses in two world wars, and he’ll be lucky if the madness of civilization doesn’t affect him.
Sven’s ugliness is only skin-deep, and readers will love the beauty and depth of his story.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-59255-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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