An excellent novel–readers will want more.
Jenkins’ debut novel tells the riveting Civil War saga of Ethan Fraser, a half-white, half-Sioux teenager who journeys from his Illinois home to Civil War battlegrounds to imprisonment in Confederate prisoner camps, all in a quest to understand his Native American roots.
Readers join Ethan near the beginning of the Civil War–he joins the 36th Illinois after one of his older brothers is killed, eventually becoming a courier for a Northern spy. Readers follow him on a daring escape from captivity behind enemy lines to his recapture and imprisonment in Alabama’s horrific Cahaba Prison. When a prison transfer to Mobile, Ala., offers an opportunity for escape, Ethan is once again off and running, ending up in the home of Elizabeth Magrath, a well-to-do widow of Northern heritage. Before long, Ethan and the widow fall in what passes for love in wartime, but the hero isn’t content to wait out the war in hiding. With Elizabeth’s aid he returns to the Union, only to be court-martialed for desertion and espionage. When a racist jury sentences him to death, Ethan escapes once again, this time determined to find his mother’s people in the Great Plains. He is taken in by a band of Cheyenne who teach him their ways, and learns firsthand the atrocities of so-called “civilized” white men. Ethan struggles to reconcile his two heritages, and eventually negotiates his own peace–one that adheres completely to neither the white nor the Native ways. Jenkins crafts a fascinating tale, painstakingly researched and richly detailed. Part potboiler, part historical fiction, readers won’t be able to put it down until the final page.
An excellent novel–readers will want more.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4196-7021-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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