An illuminating novel about westward expansion in North America in the late 18th century, marred by uneven prose.
American frontier settlers fight off British and Native American attackers in 1774 and 1775.
In this debut historical novel, Sims relates the story of Jacob Horn and other hardy American settlers in Kentucky. While searching for a stray cow, Jacob discovers a small Native American war party escorting three white prisoners back to a Shawnee village. The young frontiersman kills the four warriors, frees the captives, including the comely young Adelia, and takes them back to Drapers Forge, a large fort and settlement on the frontier. A romance buds between Jacob and Adelia, but all is not well. Attempting to carry out the British strategy of halting American westward expansion, Col. Charleton arrives outside the gate with a cannon, troops, and Shawnee allies. The Brits lay siege to the fort, but the stalwart defenders wound many cannoneers. Failing to fully breach the fort’s walls with his cannon, Charleton orders an assault but inexplicably commands his troops to mow down their Shawnee associates in the initial attack. Charleton is later captured, tortured, and killed by surviving Native Americans, and his remaining soldiers switch sides and help the Americans hold off another Shawnee attack. Will Jacob, who is wounded a couple of times, survive? Sims has produced a novel that gives an idea of what life on the American frontier was like. His descriptions of historical guns and military tactics are acute, but his amateurish writing style tarnishes the work. The book contains many spelling errors, especially with homonyms such as might/mite, dear/deer, and pallet/palate. The prose tends to wordy constructions (like “a period of time”) and clichés: characters are prone to breathing “a sigh of relief.” His portrayal of “sinister” Native Americans remains stereotyped: the stoic chief Yellow Eye smiles “evilly to himself.” Dialogue can be as hackneyed as a dated Western movie: “Real quiet, almost too quiet,” one frontiersman intones, and a Dutch immigrant speaks in an annoyingly transcribed accent: “Iss gut.” Some passages are simply unbelievable, such as Jacob singlehandedly slaying four Native American braves or Charleton attacking his Shawnee allies.
An illuminating novel about westward expansion in North America in the late 18th century, marred by uneven prose.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-4951-9308-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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