Far-from-compelling in a romantic-historical series about the settling of America, with each installment moving west into a...
Tomahawks flash and war cries resound, but Bittner’s latest historical is predictable and dull.
Not that she hasn’t done the research—just about every Indian tribe east of the mighty Mississippi circa 1750 gets involved. And they are a bloodthirsty lot, given to munching the still-beating hearts of their vanquished foes. Sixteen-year-old Jessica Matthews has heard of such horrors, and her father has warned her to stay close to the family cabin in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania. Out for a walk one winter’s day, Jess is attacked by a small band, then rescued by handsome Noah Wilde, a hunter who risks his life to save hers and with whom she falls in love, of course. Turns out he’s a spy for the English, who are fighting the French and Indians (his wife was murdered by a renegade tribe). He promises to return to help the family move back to Albany, New York, where he will marry Jessica in a month’s time. But in his absence another band of Indians slaughter Jess’s father and brother, burn her mother and a friend alive, kidnap her baby brother Billy and take Jess captive. The Indian women are not unkind to her, but she recoils at having her ears pierced and face painted—or sleeping with the young buck who seems to be intent on having her. When Noah rescues her again, after a bloody victory, the two travel through the frontier in a fruitless search for Jess’s little brother. Noah is relieved to find that sweet Jess is still a virgin, whereupon he claims her his own forever. Various historical figures are introduced in you-are-there style, including a wicked French priest who corrupts and exploits the gullible Indians; and the 20-year-old George Washington, as noble, gallant, and stiff as a formal portrait in oils.
Far-from-compelling in a romantic-historical series about the settling of America, with each installment moving west into a new place and time.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-765-30066-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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