Debates about empires and lavish depictions of culture bring moments of relief in a haunting drama that reflects a Federico...
A historical novel continues the story of Col. Alejandro Luis De La Voca Rivera, a swashbuckling military hero stationed in colonial New Spain.
The time frame for Diaz’s (Shadows Under the Sun, 2016) sequel is never specifically stated, but the action takes place during the period of Spain’s rule over what is today Mexico and New Mexico. Albuquerque and Santa Fe are already established outposts, governed by an elite class that traces its roots to the Iberian Peninsula. As the tale opens, Alejandro has just arrived in the Yucatán town of Campeche, having traveled from Santa Fe in part to deliver a package of correspondence to the beautiful young widow Maria Angela Alvarez Candelaria from her brother. Alejandro and Angela were once engaged; now their romance is rekindled. The story follows the couple during their first few years of marriage while they are living in Mexico and on their subsequent journey back to Spain to spend time at Alejandro’s ancestral home. In Madrid, Angela is presented to the king and queen and learns that her husband is a marquis, quite popular with the royal family (“Her mind raced with the day’s wonderful memories. There was the grand palace with servants everywhere…lunch and countless hours of discourse with the most noble of nobles. She had also discovered that she was a noble woman by marriage and now felt silly at having repeated over and over during the walk back, ‘Marquesa de Carzola’ ”). Unfortunately, she becomes so enchanted with frivolous palace life that she is diminished as a three-dimensional character, losing the depth and compassion that made her so charming in the first volume and the earlier half of this one. Diaz also introduces an element of mysticism to this installment. Alejandro’s adopted daughter delivers a grim prophecy, resulting in a pervasive sense of melancholy that leaches joy from the second half of the narrative. As he did in his earlier work, the author frequently juxtaposes the colonel’s fierceness in combat with his innate tenderness, sense of justice, loyalty toward his men, deep religious convictions, and concern for the poor and needy. Diaz fills the adventure with bloody battles, political intrigue, schemes, and revenge.
Debates about empires and lavish depictions of culture bring moments of relief in a haunting drama that reflects a Federico García Lorca-esque focus on life’s inevitable tragedies.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5246-4800-8
Page Count: 328
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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