A strong, debut historical novel.
A Swedish boy makes good in the New World in this rags-to-riches story.
Peter Olaf Hokanson, a 17-year-old Swede, is obsessed with America and the possibilities presented by the faraway country. Unwilling to labor in his father’s woodworking shop for the rest of his life, our hero leaves his family and girlfriend in order to make a new life in the United States. After a long journey alone across the Atlantic and a train trip from New York, Peter arrives in Minnesota in 1895, where he finds an untamed, frozen landscape covered in forests. The lumber industry is booming and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul are quickly developing. With the help of his already established cousin, Sven, and a new friend, Gus, Peter quickly finds his first job as a lumberjack, which kicks off his astonishing ten year evolution from poor immigrant laborer to lumber company executive to wealthy and prestigious factory owner. Yet this path toward success does not come easily—each chapter in the novel includes a particular challenge that Peter must overcome, whether it’s almost freezing to death after fighting off a pack of wolves on Christmas day, dealing with the tragic death of a loved one, overcoming lost love, or facing an assault with a deadly weapon charge. This steady stream of obstacles teaches Peter that, in the tradition of Horatio Alger, hard work, determination and loyalty lead to wealth and happiness. For the reader, these tests keep the pages flowing and the story moving forward at a good pace. Additionally, the novel is peppered with Peter’s love affairs with very different women—a Swedish sweetheart, a half-Indian healer and his boss’ daughters—that function to keep his story interesting. Grabmeier clearly has done his homework in terms of the lumber industry’s history in Minnesota and its effect on the state’s growth, and he should be applauded for weaving insightful historical facts into the book without drowning the narrative in them. While Peter’s trial skirts bombast, overall the book offers a nice twist on the typical immigrant-makes-good-in America storyline.
A strong, debut historical novel.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2000
ISBN: 978-0595157440
Page Count: 480
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2010
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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