A historically meticulous and cinematically dramatic kidnapping tale.
A settler in Texas desperately tries to recover his children, who were abducted by Comanches, in this historical novel.
Mitchell Putman is no stranger to adventure or danger—he fought in the War of 1812, where he “honed Indian fightin’ skills, learnin’ fightin’ the way of these noble native people.” So it is unsurprising that he joins the many Americans who move to Mexican-controlled Texas during the 1820s, enticed by the offer of inexpensive land for sale. But there is a catch—the pioneers are drawn there to provide a defensive buffer between Mexicans and violent Native American tribes, and so the cheap land comes at the steep price of grave danger, perils thrillingly depicted by Landerman-Moore. After Putman moves there with his family, he quickly realizes just how volatile a world he’s entered. When tensions escalate into war, he joins a small army led by Sam Houston in 1836 to protect terribly vulnerable pioneers from the onslaught of the Mexican military as well as Native Americans, and he fights with valor in the decisive battle of San Jacinto. But later, vengeful Comanches kidnap five of his children and Matilda, the young daughter of his friend Andrew Lockhart. The author movingly chronicles Putman’s desperate search for his lost children, a grim but heroic quest. Similarly, Landerman-Moore deftly paints a bleak picture of the predicament many American pioneers found themselves in when their welcome was officially worn out. Putman reflects on precisely this when he witnesses the dispossessed firsthand: “Lookin’ up and down that ragged column I wondered how God would help us for it be a truth every Texian woman, man or child staggerin’ along were now sorrowful refugees, many near bein’ destitute, all near absent of hope. Despair is an awful thing to behold.” This is a rigorously researched and intensely gripping “family history novel.”
A historically meticulous and cinematically dramatic kidnapping tale.Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-03-913507-9
Page Count: 204
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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