Subtly drawn scenes of naturalistic beauty and sudden brutality redeem Gatewood's distracting tendency to write dialogue,...
A first novel set in 1930s New Mexico finds an extraordinarily resourceful, but emotionally wounded, 18-year-old on a violent search for moral truth.
Fed-up with his drunk, dangerously abusive father, Trude Mason puts his mother on a horse, loads up a mule with provisions, saddles up his trusty mare Triften, and heads for Colorado, where he hopes to find ranch work and make a new start. Though he stares down his knife-wielding father, Trude encounters disaster in the mountains that leaves his mother dead. Later, he witnesses and fails to avenge the murder of a young black girl's child by a gloating, well-dressed Englishman. Left in the mountains for dead, Trude wanders into a nameless town whose peculiar, pathetic Cormac McCarthy–esque denizens are betting that the arrival of a railroad spur will bring them wealth and civilization. Though he finds a friend in the wistful rancher Charlie Ford, Trude sees right through the pretentiousness of most of the townsfolk, finding little to like in the drunken hedonism of a young Italian immigrant John Frank, the gloating bigotry of the Ralston brothers, and the bloviating mayor, who lectures Trude about showing respect for authority. Trude challenges that authority when he discovers that the black girl has been imprisoned unjustly and might even be executed. Trude has to take justice into his own hands, and, in this postmodern updating of the formula western, heroic action leads to nothing but loss and sorrow. Only after returning to the mountains can Trude come to terms with the grief that plagues his heart.
Subtly drawn scenes of naturalistic beauty and sudden brutality redeem Gatewood's distracting tendency to write dialogue, some trite (an aging mentor remarks, “pain ain’t nothin’ more than the memory of comfort”), without quotation marks.Pub Date: May 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-6802-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
Constructed with delicacy, lyricism, and care, Hertmans’ novel still feels occasionally static.
A Christian woman and a Jewish man fall in love in medieval France.
In 1088, a Christian girl of Norman descent falls in love with the son of a rabbi. They run away together, to disastrous effect: Her father sends knights after them, and though they flee to a small southern village where they spend a few happy years, their budding family is soon decimated by a violent wave of First Crusaders on their way to Jerusalem. The girl, whose name becomes Hamoutal when she converts to Judaism, winds up roaming the world. Hertmans’ (War and Turpentine, 2016, etc.) latest novel is based on a true story: The Cairo Genizah, a trove of medieval manuscripts preserved in an Egyptian synagogue, contained an account of Hamoutal’s plight. Hamoutal makes up about half of Hertmans’ novel; the other half is consumed by Hertmans’ own interest in her story. Whenever he can, he follows her journey: from Rouen, where she grew up, to Monieux, where she and David Todros—her Jewish husband—made a brief life for themselves, and all the way to Cairo, and back. “Knowing her life story and its tragic end,” Hertmans writes, “I wish I could warn her of what lies ahead.” The book has a quiet intimacy to it, and in his descriptions of landscape and travel, Hertmans’ prose is frequently lovely. In Narbonne, where David’s family lived, Hertmans describes “the cool of the paving stones in the late morning, the sound of doves’ wings flapping in the immaculate air.” But despite the drama of Hamoutal’s story, there is a static quality to the book, particularly in the sections where Hertmans describes his own travels. It’s an odd contradiction: Hertmans himself moves quickly through the world, but his book doesn’t quite move quickly enough.
Constructed with delicacy, lyricism, and care, Hertmans’ novel still feels occasionally static.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4708-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Light on surprises and character development, this tepid thriller will have most astute readers correctly guessing the...
An accident forces a man to return to his small Iowa hometown and confront violent secrets from his past, ones he’s kept hidden from his wife.
Sarah Quinlan thought she knew everything about her husband, Jack: an accident killed his parents when he was 15 so he left Penny Gate, Iowa, and has only been back once. But when the couple gets news that Jack’s beloved aunt Julia, who raised Jack and his younger sister, Amy, after their parents’ deaths, is gravely injured in a fall, the prodigal son returns. Gudenkauf (Little Mercies, 2014, etc.) makes it clear from the start that nothing should be taken at face value, not Jack’s story about his parents (his mother was actually bludgeoned to death, and his father, now MIA, was the prime suspect) or the seemingly idyllic small-town atmosphere. This, however, does little to heighten the suspense as advice columnist Sarah takes on the role of amateur detective in sniffing out Quinlan family secrets past and present. Through her we meet Jack’s terse cousin Dean and his too-perfect wife, Celia, along with Julia’s husband, Hal, who became like a father to Jack in the wake of his own family tragedy, and Amy, who couldn’t be more stereotypically “troubled.” Jack and Amy’s tragic past, which becomes the central mystery of the plot once Sarah figures out that her husband has been lying to her for two decades, is tied to Julia’s not-so-accidental fall, but only for the purposes of a neatly sewn-up plot.
Light on surprises and character development, this tepid thriller will have most astute readers correctly guessing the ending halfway through.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1865-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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