The first volume of an emerging trilogy tracing the adventures of Sam Flint, intrepid frontier newspaperman. Lured by a civic committee headed by the city's chief entrepreneur, Judge Cutlip, to the frontier hamlet of Payday, Arizona, Flint is enticed to stay on by what is described throughout as an Edenic setting—a place offering perfect climate, good land, and honest people. The townsfolk hope Flint's newspaper, The Payday Pioneer, will entice more settlers to come, ensuring a prosperous future. Though doubtful, the young editor sets to work and succeeds beyond anyone's expectations. But complications soon arise as established cattlemen resist the encroachment of sheepmen and farmers on the previously open range. Things get even more complex when the attractive young wife of a missing rancher captures Flint's heart. Moreover, his dedication to editorial integrity soon gains him the ire not only of the profit-minded merchants but also of the county's most powerful rancher. All conflicts are set aside, however, when Flint's efforts begin to attract a nefarious element and the town fills with thugs, hired gunmen, and even an evil madam, Odie Racine, who's bent on extortion. Racine's malevolence forces Payday's citizens to join forces with the crusading editor, putting aside personal concerns as they fight to save their town. Though his characters never rise off the page, and the action is somewhere on a par with 1950s TV horse operas, Wheeler (Sierra, 1996, etc.) uses rather than merely displays his knowledge of the period, its details, and its attitudes. The Flint series will be a welcome addition to the reading lists of younger western fans, and a happy find for all those who prefer more traditional forms of the genre.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-86366-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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