An intimate fictionalization of a dark incident from Colonial history.
Renner’s debut novel uses her ancestor’s life story to reflect on the paranoia and persecution in Massachusetts during the Salem witch trials.
Rebecca Blake Eames (1641-1721) was Renner’s ninth great-grandmother. The novel opens in 1692 on a familiar scene: slave woman Tituba is showing two girls a folk magic trick. All seems harmless until the girls start convulsing—apparently victims of witchcraft. This incident, which sparked Salem’s witch trials, is best known through Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Renner’s parallel story is set in nearby Andover, Massachusetts, where news of these strange afflictions arrived months ago. A feud between the Swan and Eames families comes to a head when Rebecca curses the patriarch publicly: “Damn you, Robert Swan!...And may the devil himself visit your home!” Her seeming familiarity with the devil leads to her arrest on charges of witchcraft, and she and her son, Daniel, are thrown in a dungeon. Renner paints a harrowing picture of primitive prison life. Beatings, fleas and slop buckets are only the beginning; worse, Rebecca suspects that 4-year-old Dorcas Good, also imprisoned, has been sexually assaulted. Through flashbacks, readers learn that Rebecca believes she is being punished for committing adultery early in her marriage. She fakes a confession about her involvement with Satan and is sentenced to hang with eight others. She’s saved by chance—they are one noose short. The prose memorably uses period props, as in “the breeze extinguished the tallow candle.” Renner’s deep research is especially evident in descriptions of illnesses; she writes of “jail fever,” apoplexy and gangrene, which necessitates a grisly amputation. Historical figures like Cotton Mather and Judge Hathorne fit in neatly, and the close third-person narration allows access to Rebecca’s and her husband’s thoughts. A subplot about their daughter Dorothy’s romance with Samuel Swan and her foiled abduction by Indians sputters but doesn’t distract from the central tale.
An intimate fictionalization of a dark incident from Colonial history.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491705957
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Back to a Jurassic Park sideshow for another immensely entertaining adventure, this fashioned from the loose ends of Crichton's 1990 bestseller. Six years after the lethal rampage that closed the primordial zoo offshore Costa Rica, there are reports of strange beasts in widely separated Central American venues. Intrigued by the rumors, Richard Levine, a brilliant but arrogant paleontologist, goes in search of what he hopes will prove a lost world. Aided by state-of- the-art equipment, Levine finds a likely Costa Rican outpostbut quickly comes to grief, having disregarded the warnings of mathematician Ian Malcolm (the sequel's only holdover character). Malcolm and engineer Doc Thorne organize a rescue mission whose ranks include mechanical whiz Eddie Carr and Sarah Harding, a biologist doing fieldwork with predatory mammals in East Africa. The party of four is unexpectedly augmented by two children, Kelly Curtis, a 13-year-old "brainer," and Arby Benton, a black computer genius, age 11. Once on the coastal island, the deliverance crew soon links up with an unchastened Levine and locates the hush-hush genetics lab complex used to stock the ill- fated Jurassic Park with triceratops, tyrannosaurs, velociraptors, etc. Meanwhile, a mad amoral scientist and his own group, in pursuit of extinct creatures for biotech experiments, have also landed on the mysterious island. As it turns out, the prehistoric fauna is hostile to outsiders, and so the good guys as well as their malefic counterparts spend considerable time running through the triple-canopy jungle in justifiable terror. The far-from-dumb brutes exact a gruesomely heavy toll before the infinitely resourceful white-hat interlopers make their final breakout. Pell-mell action and hairbreadth escapes, plus periodic commentary on the uses and abuses of science: the admirable Crichton keeps the pot boiling throughout.
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41946-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
A satisfyingly streamlined World War II thriller.
During the Nazi occupation of Paris, an architect devises ingenious hiding places for Jews.
In architect Belfoure’s fiction debut, the architectural and historical details are closely rendered, while the characters are mostly sketchy stereotypes. Depraved Gestapo colonel Schlegal and his torturer lackeys and thuggish henchmen see their main goal as tracking down every last Jew in Paris who has not already been deported to a concentration camp. Meanwhile, Lucien, an opportunistic architect whose opportunities have evaporated since 1940, when the Germans marched into Paris, is desperate for a job—so desperate that when industrialist Manet calls upon him to devise a hiding place for a wealthy Jewish friend, he accepts, since Manet can also offer him a commission to design a factory. While performing his factory assignment (the facility will turn out armaments for the Reich), Lucien meets kindred spirit Herzog, a Wehrmacht officer with a keen appreciation of architectural engineering, who views capturing Jews as an ill-advised distraction from winning the war for Germany. The friendship makes Lucien’s collaboration with the German war effort almost palatable—the money isn’t that good. Bigger payouts come as Manet persuades a reluctant Lucien to keep designing hideouts. His inventive cubbyholes—a seamless door in an ornamental column, a staircase section with an undetectable opening, even a kitchen floor drain—all help Jews evade the ever-tightening net of Schlegal and his crew. However, the pressure on Lucien is mounting. A seemingly foolproof fireplace contained a disastrous fatal flaw. His closest associates—apprentice Alain and mistress Adele—prove to have connections to the Gestapo, and, at Manet’s urging, Lucien has adopted a Jewish orphan, Pierre. The Resistance has taken him for short drives to warn him about the postwar consequences of collaboration, and his wife, Celeste, has left in disgust. Belfoure wastes no time prettying up his strictly workmanlike prose. As the tension increases, the most salient virtue of this effort—the expertly structured plot—emerges.
A satisfyingly streamlined World War II thriller.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4022-8431-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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