Reminiscent of one of those wonderful 19th-century doorstop novels.
A story of coming-of-age, of nurturing and of the fact that it does indeed take a village to raise a child. Or to raise seven of them, for that matter.
Novelist Rosa (Reflections on a Stone, 2011, etc.) takes Lumberville, Penn., on the Delaware River, and peoples it with very memorable characters in the early 20th century. Angelo Giusto, though only 9, is the oldest of the seven orphaned Giustos who have been scattered from Brooklyn to orphanages far and wide. He plans to find all his siblings and make the family whole again. At the outset, he becomes the protector of a little African-American orphan boy, James Houston, who is picked on mercilessly. Fearless Angelo becomes James’ hero. Hearing that two of the Giusto brothers have been sent to Kansas, Angelo and James resolve to get there somehow and bring them back. But they get only as far as Lumberville, the village that welcomes and nurtures them. The main characters are Angelo and Penny Brown, a woman who has lost her only child and whose callow husband has run off. Penny, like Angelo, is tough, resourceful, and relentlessly optimistic. Civil War veteran and amputee Zeke Thompson comes out of a previous Rosa novel (Zeke Thompson, American Hero, 2011) to oversee the boys’ upbringing and is ably assisted by the ingenious and perceptive Frank Martin, a man with a mysterious past. Lumberville is an idyllic place, and the reader is reminded of Tom Sawyer’s Missouri village, or Mayberry, RFD. But there are real toads in this garden, and the good guys—just as protective of the children as Angelo is of James—find and root them out. Rosa is a gifted storyteller who makes hardly a misstep. And at 500 pages, she does not stint. An afterword tells us just who in Rosa’s real life inspired these characters. And for those who like a Dickensian sweep, the novel ends with a grand retrospective of what the Giusto kids, all grown up, have made of their lives as the midcentury nears.
Reminiscent of one of those wonderful 19th-century doorstop novels.Pub Date: June 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-1453845790
Page Count: 518
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A rollicking soap opera that keeps the pages turning with a surfeit of births, deaths, and surprising plot reveals.
Historical fiction concerning the intricate battles over succession within the family that controls a poor rural county in post–World War I Virginia.
Duke Kincaid owns most of Claiborne County, both financially and politically. A charming, ruthless autocrat, feared yet beloved, he has three acknowledged children by three different wives (not to mention unacknowledged offspring). Shortly after his fourth marriage, the Duke dies unexpectedly. Although pragmatic, street-smart middle child Sallie is his intellectual and emotional heir, the Duke leaves his estate to her emotionally oversensitive half brother, Eddie, because he’s the only boy. Seventeen-year-old Sallie is devoted to Eddie, who's 13, but after he commits suicide she's torn by conflicting loyalties to her weak but lovable stepmother; her father’s scheming but able sister; and her older half sister, Mary, who's next in line to inherit the Kincaid empire but has not lived in Claiborne Country since her parents divorced. Family intrigue plays out against the backdrop of 1920s Claiborne County, where racism is a given, Prohibition is the law, and bootlegging is the main source of income for Blacks and Whites. Staunch prohibitionist Mary goes to war against the bootleggers using an enforcer who employs extreme violence. Sallie wants to support her sister but sympathizes with the bootleggers—her neighbors and tenants—and recognizes that the family's finances depend on trading whiskey. Defining what is moral becomes complicated for Sallie. So does defining family. Tough and independent, Sallie refuses to let womanhood limit her ambitions as she earns the nickname Queen of the Kincaid Rumrunners. History buffs will enjoy the many hints Walls sprinkles to show that Tudor England is her novel’s template (the Duke’s marriage to his brother’s widow; his banished daughter, Mary, and short-lived heir, Edward; the Kincaids’ counselor Cecil, etc.). Television buffs will smile at the Kincaids’ resemblance to the Roys of Succession.
A rollicking soap opera that keeps the pages turning with a surfeit of births, deaths, and surprising plot reveals.Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781501117299
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.
The miseries of the Depression and Dust Bowl years shape the destiny of a Texas family.
“Hope is a coin I carry: an American penny, given to me by a man I came to love. There were times in my journey when I felt as if that penny and the hope it represented were the only things that kept me going.” We meet Elsa Wolcott in Dalhart, Texas, in 1921, on the eve of her 25th birthday, and wind up with her in California in 1936 in a saga of almost unrelieved woe. Despised by her shallow parents and sisters for being sickly and unattractive—“too tall, too thin, too pale, too unsure of herself”—Elsa escapes their cruelty when a single night of abandon leads to pregnancy and forced marriage to the son of Italian immigrant farmers. Though she finds some joy working the land, tending the animals, and learning her way around Mama Rose's kitchen, her marriage is never happy, the pleasures of early motherhood are brief, and soon the disastrous droughts of the 1930s drive all the farmers of the area to despair and starvation. Elsa's search for a better life for her children takes them out west to California, where things turn out to be even worse. While she never overcomes her low self-esteem about her looks, Elsa displays an iron core of character and courage as she faces dust storms, floods, hunger riots, homelessness, poverty, the misery of migrant labor, bigotry, union busting, violent goons, and more. The pedantic aims of the novel are hard to ignore as Hannah embodies her history lesson in what feels like a series of sepia-toned postcards depicting melodramatic scenes and clichéd emotions.
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2501-7860-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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