Despite some loose ends and an unsatisfying framing device, a robust debut that wears its meticulous research lightly.
On the road in 1830s Pennsylvania, a boy comes of age with brutal suddenness; a twisty, gripping first novel from British author Lautner.
Thomas is a bookish only child in Manhattan, home-schooled by his aunt. Everything changes for the 12-year-old narrator in 1837. His mother dies of smallpox, and the financial panic forces his father, a mild-mannered salesman of eyeglasses, to visit the young Samuel Colt’s firearms company. (Colt’s pernicious influence haunts the work.) Thomas’ dad will take orders for pistols, traveling with horse and wagon through Pennsylvania settlements before venturing further West. Their expedition ends when a ruffian, Thomas Heywood, and three trashy accomplices follow father and son to their camp, take their guns and money, and shoot the father dead. The boy returns to the store where they met Heywood to report the murder and runs into the redoubtable Henry Stands. The hell-raising, gun-loving old timer was once a ranger; his latest mission is to round up escaped prisoners for a price. A good man or a bad? Thomas, reeling from the actions of a villain, must now learn there are shades of gray. Henry ignores the boy’s plight, but Thomas is persistent, and Henry becomes his reluctant protector. The pairing may remind readers of the grizzled curmudgeon and needy youngster in Charles Portis’ True Grit and its two movie versions, but this novel does not have the straightforward trajectory of the revenge quest. Thomas just wants to go home; Henry is after his bounty. Then Heywood and company ambush them, and Henry has a score to settle. In a further complication, Thomas is threatened with removal to an orphan asylum. There will be two shootouts, with different sets of adversaries, but Lautner offers more than action. There’s a quiet, exquisite moment when Henry, preparing a rabbit for their dinner, stoically recalls his son, who died in infancy.
Despite some loose ends and an unsatisfying framing device, a robust debut that wears its meticulous research lightly.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3163-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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