A debut author follows the dictum “Write what you know” by building a historical novel around an Old West myth from his corner of Utah.
As the title suggests, Swapp’s book centers on a long-buried treasure owned by the cantankerous Samuel Clevenger. The tale opens with two prisoners playing a hand of poker for their lives: “This was a card game of life or death. Each man’s fate was literally at hand. Each man, ever so clearly, knew the gravity of this game of fate.” How did hard-luck cowboy Frank Willson and mulatto ex–cavalry soldier John Johnson end up in this situation? The story flashes back to the two signing on to help Clevenger move with his sickly wife, Charlotte, and their adopted stepdaughter, Jessie, from the Arizona Territory to the Washington Territory in 1886. But Frank and John don’t know what kind of man Clevenger is until it’s too late. After Clevenger’s endless verbal abuse of both men and Jessie, to whom Frank has become attracted, the cowboy says, “I ’bout had enough of that old bastard, Jessie. I ain’t never seen anyone treat a woman so.” Soon thereafter, Clevenger and Charlotte are buried in a shallow grave, and the other three are fugitives, although not terribly smart ones, as they stand out while crossing through Mormon Utah and are soon caught, with John and Frank convicted of murder. Swapp’s meticulous research gives him a sturdy framework for his imagining of how and why this crime occurred and where Clevenger’s gold may still reside. As the author reveals in his introduction: “Although this story is written as historical fiction, the basic facts herein are absolutely accurate to the timeline and locations.” He skillfully alternates between the dangers the travelers faced, such as a perilous ferry ride across a powerful river and a Native American attack, and the safe oases that small settlements offered. Scant descriptions in historical records and publications of the time allow the author to fully develop characters who fit smoothly into his narrative. Swapp has successfully brought alive a little-known piece of Old West history and sweetened it with a potential $1 million in buried loot.
This cautionary tale of buried treasure and murder shows how wrong choices lead to tragic results.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61984-548-0
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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Debut novel by hip-hop rap artist Sister Souljah, whose No Disrespect (1994), which mixes sexual history with political diatribe, is popular in schools country-wide. In its way, this is a tour de force of black English and underworld slang, as finely tuned to its heroine’s voice as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The subject matter, though, has a certain flashiness, like a black Godfather family saga, and the heroine’s eventual fall develops only glancingly from her character. Born to a 14-year-old mother during one of New York’s worst snowstorms, Winter Santiaga is the teenaged daughter of Ricky Santiaga, Brooklyn’s top drug dealer, who lives like an Arab prince and treats his wife and four daughters like a queen and her princesses. Winter lost her virginity at 12 and now focuses unwaveringly on varieties of adolescent self-indulgence: sex and sugar-daddies, clothes, and getting her own way. She uses school only as a stepping-stone for getting out of the house—after all, nobody’s paying her to go there. But if there’s no money in it, why go? Meanwhile, Daddy decides it’s time to move out of Brooklyn to truly fancy digs on Long Island, though this places him in the discomfiting position of not being absolutely hands-on with his dealers; and sure enough the rise of some young Turks leads to his arrest. Then he does something really stupid: he murders his wife’s two weak brothers in jail with him on Riker’s Island and gets two consecutive life sentences. Winter’s then on her own, especially with Bullet, who may have replaced her dad as top hood, though when she selfishly fails to help her pregnant buddy Simone, there’s worse—much worse—to come. Thinness aside: riveting stuff, with language so frank it curls your hair. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-02578-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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