A devastating tale rendered with restrained serenity.
A family is caught in a vortex of violence.
Based partly on a woman’s account of her abduction along with her children during the Sioux Uprising in 1862, Moore’s novel is a tense, absorbing tale of adversity and survival. One August day in 1855, 25-year-old Sarah Browne flees her abusive husband in Rhode Island, headed west to meet a childhood friend in the Minnesota Territory. Her journey is long and arduous: A freight boat crawls with rats, mosquitoes cover her with bites. She is hungry, filthy, and uneasy with the freedom that she so desperately desires. She feels, she reflects, “adrift on a great river, and adrift in my mind.” Finally arrived in Shakopee, she learns that her friend had died months before. Though bereft, Sarah proves herself resourceful: Soon she finds a job, and then she finds a husband: Dr. John Brinton, the town’s physician. Like all of Moore’s characters, including Sarah, he harbors secrets. Moore picks up Sarah’s life again in 1862, when, with the couple’s two children, they have moved from Shakopee to a home near the Yellow Medicine reservation, where Brinton becomes the resident doctor. As in her novel One Last Look (2003), set during the British Raj, Moore’s interest is oppression: Here, of Native Americans by ruthless, bigoted Whites intent on driving them from their land or exterminating them. As Sarah forges friendships with tribal women, she becomes increasingly aware of the corruption and injustice that blight their lives. Federal agents have cheated Indians out of compensation for the sale of 24 million acres of land. Without those funds, Indians are starving and disease is rampant. Revolt is inevitable, erupting into a grisly massacre. In Sarah, Moore has imagined a brave, perceptive woman with no illusions about the hypocrisy of those who proclaim themselves civilized. Fearlessly defiant, she emerges as the moral center of Moore’s compelling novel.
A devastating tale rendered with restrained serenity.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9780385351430
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.
A woman faces a health crisis and obsesses over a local accident in this wonderful follow-up to Sandwich (2024).
Newman begins her latest with a quote from Nora Ephron: “Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know—it’s everywhere. You could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again, you could be.” It sets an appropriate tone for a story that is just as full of death and dread as it is laughter. Two years after the events of Sandwich, Rocky is back home in Western Massachusetts and happily surrounded by family—her daughter, Willa, lives with her and her husband, Nick, while applying to Ph.D. programs; her widowed father, Mort, has moved into the in-law apartment behind their house. When a young man who graduated from high school with Rocky’s son, Jamie, is hit by a train, Rocky finds herself spiraling as she thinks about how close the tragedy came to her own family. She’s also freaking out about a mysterious rash her dermatologist can’t explain. Both instances are tailor-made for internet research and stalking. As Rocky obsessively googles her symptoms and finds only bad news (“Here’s what’s true about the Internet: very infrequently do people log on with their good news. Gosh, they don’t write, I had this weird rash on my forearm? And it turned out to be completely nothing!”), she also compulsively checks the Facebook page of the accident victim’s mother. Newman excels at showing how sorrow and joy coexist in everyday life. She masterfully balances a modern exploration of grief with truly laugh-out-loud lines (one passage about the absurdity of collecting a stool sample and delivering it to the doctor stands out). As Rocky deals with the byzantine frustrations of the medical system, she also has to learn, once more, how to see her children, husband, father, and herself as fully flawed and lovable humans.
A heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063453913
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
