Nicely written—but talk about a Christmas carol.
Spellbinding translator of the Irish saga of the Ulster Cycle, Eickhoff also writes novels whose plots knot until they sweat (Fallon’s Wake, 2000).
Set in South Dakota farm country, this one turns on a murder. At first it’s muted, woven into other deaths—a woman who skidded off the highway and froze in the snow, and a madwoman who blew her brains out with a shotgun. The story, like Carson McCullers’s Member of the Wedding, features a 12-year-old tomboy, Samantha “Sam” McCaslin, short-haired, fistfighting, cattle-herding by horseback in winter ice, and pushing back puberty while Eickhoff loads on the local color and family background. Every fourth year or so, Sam’s birthday lands on Thanksgiving Day, and this time, in the early ’50s with the Korean War on, her birthday collapses when she slights her precious cousin Rose Marie, who eats one bean at a time and chews it thirty times. So Sam’s present of a Marlin rifle is withheld for awhile. A visiting gypsy fortuneteller warns her to watch out for danger in the snow, while another gives her an amulet against the Evil Eye. Earlier, she’d been grounded for three weeks when she asked in Sunday School whether she was a figment of God’s imagination or He a figment of hers. Then her friend and her father’s hired hand, Abel Six Feathers, is missing. Sam had got into a fistfight with Tubby Watson and been defended by Abel. After Abel’s daughter is raped, Sam and her father find Abel’s frozen body by the south fence, shot in the back. When Sam sees Abel’s split Yellowboy knife in Tubby’s hands, Tubby takes after her. Later, she rides in bad weather to take Christmas gifts to the Six Feathers family, only to find Tubby shooting at her. And then her mother is hospitalized for cancer . . . .
Nicely written—but talk about a Christmas carol.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-765-30142-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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