A slim, mostly entertaining novel of tragic bloodshed in the Dakota Territory.
A land dispute between Cheyenne warriors and cattle ranchers sets off a violent conflict in a Wyoming settlement in this Western from O’Shea and Shurgot.
Dakota Territory, 1866. Sheriff James Talbot tries to keep the peace in the frontier boomtown of Green River—home to railroad workers, miners, cowboys, and riffraff of all kinds—but it’s a combustible place. What’s more, Talbot’s unpopular defense of the rights of the local Native Americans has made him a controversial figure in the white community. After a surprise attack on the town’s saloon—which Talbot succeeds in fending off with the help of Johnny Redfeather, a half Irish, half Apache laudanum-addicted gunslinger, plus a half-dozen prostitutes—Talbot is forced to figure out who the culprit is, and who was the target. He suspects the man behind the attack is cattle rancher Brent Tompkin, whose dispute with the Cheyenne over land rights is coming to a boil. One particular group has drawn his ire: a band of Hotamitanio—the fierce Dog Soldiers of the Southern Cheyenne—under the command of Running Bear. For Talbot, Redfeather, and a migrant Confederate veteran named Jeremiah Staggart, the conflict between Tompkin and Running Bear isn’t an if, but a when. They’ll just have to decide whether they’ll be there when it all goes down. O’Shea and Shurgot illuminate their story with wonderful details of life on the frontier: “On a rickety chair beside the doors sat a tall, thin man wearing a greasy, lop-sided top hat, a dirty, white cotton shirt, a red bandana and a string of beads around his neck, leather pants and old boots so worn that Staggart wondered what kept them on the man’s feet.” Other than a few uncomfortable instances of dialect, the characters are well drawn and embellished with significant backstory (perhaps a bit too much backstory, given that the novel has fewer than 200 pages). The plot is a tad predictable, and themes are standard Western fare, but for those looking for a quick read about violence and injustice in the Old West, this is a satisfactory product from the authors of Could You Be Startin’ From Somewhere Else? (2014).
A slim, mostly entertaining novel of tragic bloodshed in the Dakota Territory.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 175
Publisher: Sunstone Press
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2020
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 sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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