Although the dialects occasionally distract, and too many colorful characters clamor for attention, this novel effectively...
Helget’s tale of frontier life in the territory of Minnesota gives stark meaning to the term “woebegone.”
The novel interweaves the stories of several denizens of Stillwater, Minn., as the town is transformed from wilderness outpost to lumber empire. We know from the beginning how wily Beaver Jean, a fur trapper and trader, meets his end—from an ax wielded by his own daughter. The events leading up to this date with destiny are recounted in an extended flashback which comprises the novel. Lydian, Beaver Jean’s runaway wife, arrives at the orphanage run by Mother St. John, a Catholic nun, and the peripatetic priest Father Paul. There, Lydian gives birth to twins, a boy, Clement, and girl, Angel. After their mother escapes to Mexico, Angel is adopted by a wealthy couple, the Hatterbys, who live nearby, while Clement becomes the surrogate son of Mother St. John’s assistant, Big Waters, a Native American exiled by her tribe. Soon after the twins are born, a fugitive slave, Eliza, arrives at the orphanage with her young son, Davis. Ailing from consumption, Eliza has run away from her masters while they were traveling in the North, and Beaver Jean, who’s seeking other sidelines now that beaver hats are no longer fashionable menswear, is on her trail, hoping to collect a bounty. However, he’s slowed considerably by a decrepit nag and his remaining two wives. Father Paul spirits Eliza and Davis to a house of ill repute (also a stop on the Underground Railroad), where Eliza dies. Davis is adopted by a prostitute, Daisy, who was ruined after being jilted by her Southern beau. Her most frequent client is Mr. Hatterby, whose wife is slowly poisoning Angel to keep her—and her husband—close to home. But when Clement and Angel reconnect, their fierce bond will explode everyone’s best laid schemes.
Although the dialects occasionally distract, and too many colorful characters clamor for attention, this novel effectively dramatizes the seismic sociological shifts that shaped the American Midwest.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-547-89820-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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