An energetic, full-dress period novel, Maxwell's first, constructed from the adventures of Henry VIII's doomed second queen, mother of Elizabeth I of England. Here, a recently crowned Elizabeth finds her dead mother's diary, discovering not only a legacy of maternal love but the idea that Virgin Queens should stay that way. The story blasts off with a Tudorian ``God's death!'' roared by Elizabeth, but Maxwell doesn't generally weigh the narrative down with archaisms. The dutifully noted battles and political skirmishes of the great powers don't interfere with the upward strides (and missteps) of that peppery commoner, Anne Boleyn. Educated in a French court, and later in England, serving Henry's royal-born Queen Katherine, Anne, to her amazement (and greedy father's delight), is pursued by the King (``He loomed so large, those blue and laughing eyes so bright''). Having been separated from the man she really loved, Anne daringly keeps Henry in courtly pursuit—but out of bed—for six years. Meantime, Henry, determined to change queenly partners, uproots his allegiance to the Pope and creates an English church. The King and Anne marry, but now that the Unattainable has become a marital captive—and a queen unable to produce a son—Henry's frustrations (and desires) prod him to turn elsewhere. Death by execution in the Tower will cut short a life in which the stakes and odds were sky-high. Years later, Elizabeth finds in her mother's diary a pointed message: ``Never relinquish control to any man.'' Those fascinated by the Tudors—those magnificent, truly terrifying political animals—may find the characterizations and the language occasionally too modern. But Anne's straight-from-the- stomacher confessions, and Elizabeth's thundering about, should appeal to all fanciers of imagined portraits of Tudor-era heroines, like the late Eleanor Hibbert's (a.k.a. Victoria Holt, Philippa Carr, Jean Plaidy) gallery of royal queens. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55970-375-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
Admirably crisp prose within a disappointingly slight study of race and family.
In this debut novel, long-listed for the Orange Prize, a black family struggles to hold itself together in the South Dakota Badlands of 1917, tested by drought, racism and suspicion.
The story opens with a striking scene that shows just how difficult the DuPrees have it: A two-month drought has forced Rachel, the family matriarch and novel’s narrator, to send her six-year-old daughter down a well to gather enough water for the family. Rachel has been living on this arid farm for the past 14 years, moving from Chicago to follow her husband, Isaac, an Army veteran who took advantage of the Homestead Act to acquire and expand their property. Together they had seven children, five of which have survived the tough landscape, and Rachel is close to delivering another as the story begins. That tension set, Weisgarber shuttles the narrative back and forth in time, capturing Rachel’s earlier life working in a boardinghouse for the black laborers at the Chicago stockyards. The owner of the boardinghouse, Rachel’s future mother-in-law, is a no-nonsense promoter of black uplift (Ida B. Wells makes a cameo appearance), and deep-seated racial prejudices are a consistent theme, from the brutal race riots Rachel reads about in letters from home to the contempt Isaac has for the Native Americans he fought while in the Army. Still, most of the difficulties Rachel faces are of the domestic variety, such as keeping her children fed and healing a sick milk cow. Weisgarber’s style is Alice Walker by way of Kent Haruf. She writes tenderly and with a tinge of spirituality when it comes to intimate family moments, and her spare descriptions evoke the simple territory in which the novel is set. That makes for clear storytelling, but overall the story feels curiously thin. The key plot complications—a threat to Rachel’s unborn child and a revelation about a past relationship of Isaac’s—arrive and fade with only modest drama. The muted tone is intended to be a testament to Rachel’s indomitability, but it makes her narrator as little different psychologically at story’s end as she was at the beginning.
Admirably crisp prose within a disappointingly slight study of race and family.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02201-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
Veteran historical novelist Gear (Sand in the Wind, 1993, etc.) again uses an accurate rendering of the North American past as a backdrop for some vigorous fictional heroics, this time involving a beautiful Confederate spy of skill and courageous cool. As the story opens in May 1864, half-Cherokee Robin Walkingstick Heatherton, disguised as a black boy, observes the horror of the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia. Returning to Richmond, hoping to spend Christmas with her five-year-old son, Jeremy, Robin reports to President Jefferson Davis that she has retrieved secret letters from England, taken from the body of another female Confederate spy who drowned in her eagerness to reach land from a stormy sea. Davis warns her of a deranged Yankee officer, Thomas Corley, who blames Robin for the death of his brother and swears he will hunt her down. The Confederate president sends Robin to Tennessee to join her husband, cavalry officer Charles, but the two have only one night together before he is shot by a Northern firing squad. Robin escapes and returns to Richmond for Jeremy. On to March 1865: Aboard a river boat, Robin, using one of her many aliases, wins a claim to a gold mine in Colorado while playing poker. But tough loner Garrison Parker has put in his claim for the same mine, and before black and white hats have it out in the town of Central City, Colorado, Robin will suffer a broken rib, team up with a good woman to care for Jeremy, and discover unexpected love and kindness. All ends with her last-minute escapejust when she's within an ace of cashing in her Wonder Woman chips. A heroine's tale with wide, breathless fictional strides. (This first in a projected ``Women's West'' series may appeal to YA as much as adult readers.)
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-85701-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
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