An engaging, if familiar, Western tale that should make fans of the genre happy.
A Southerner joins the Union Army and ends up forging a new life in the West in this sprawling novel from a husband-and-wife team.
As the story opens, Thomas Jefferson Summers is facing the end of his life at the age of 60. The totality of that life unfolds as the book flashes back to 1862, when Tom, 16, and his brother, John Adams Summers, 19, set off to fight for the Union Army during the Civil War. Tom is soon injured and deserts his post to head back home (“He had seen all of the war that he wanted to see”). Tragically, he finds that his parents have died and his Tennessee town has burned to the ground. And that’s just in the first 30 pages, with the rest of the narrative following Tom as he heads west, settles down, starts a family, and forges a new life in an untamed territory. Tom’s trek takes him up the Mississippi and then, via horseback, to Oklahoma, where he eventually ends up near a settlement called Camp Supply, builds a thriving cattle farm, and meets the love of his life after seeing her photograph in a newspaper. Together, they raise their children on the frontier, battling bandits, the weather, and more. This epic tale of perseverance, love, and loss includes attempted rape, murder, and other unsavory crimes in some of the wildest days of the Wild West. Called a “True-to-Life” tale, the Riddles’ novel certainly feels authentic, moves at a fast clip, and introduces readers to some rich characters, namely Tom and his family members, whom readers will care about. But the story is not without its problems. It sometimes indulges in clichés, from backwoods Southern bumpkins in Arkansas to a tobacco-spitting chuckwagon cook and a ruthless, poker-playing bandit—there’s even a scene featuring snakes, a horse, and a river, which evokes Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, one of the greatest Westerns of all time. On the plus side, there are vivid descriptions of harsh weather and brutal people. But for the most part, the audience has seen or read all of this before. Even what should be the tale’s biggest twist involving Tom is inevitable. Still, the story will satisfy lovers of Westerns even if the narrative is often predictable.
An engaging, if familiar, Western tale that should make fans of the genre happy.Pub Date: July 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1642147193
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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