Difficult, but worth it for a marvelous heroine with an iron will and a unique voice.
Enslaved to an Indian to settle her father’s gambling debt, a young girl escapes and makes her own way in mid-19th-century Nebraska.
Poet and author Svoboda (Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, 2008, etc.) has an elliptical prose style that makes demands some will find irksome. Those willing to stick with her tough, resourceful narrator, however, will be rewarded by an unsentimental picaresque recalling True Grit in its matter-of-fact portrait of a harsh society that mirrors the West’s vast, indifferent landscape. True Grit’s Mattie Ross is a creampuff compared to 12-year-old Harriet, who doesn’t tell us her real name but assumes the sobriquet of a fellow captive who killed herself. Tied to a tree and temporarily saved from being burned alive when her dancing brings rain, Harriet manages to slip her bonds and limps off (she’s been hobbled to prevent flight) to find her Pa. She acquires a baby whose family has been struck by lightning and winds up in a town being looted by soldiers—no one knows from which side, since the chaotic first year of the Civil War has given rise to armed bands of no particular allegiance. Undaunted by seeing a shopkeeper shot dead at his door, Harriet starts selling his supplies, telling the townsfolk she is his niece and has just arrived with her orphaned cousin. Over the course of the war, she establishes herself as a canny businesswoman while facing down with aplomb such threats as the arrivals of a peddler who knew her as a captive and of her crazy Indian captor. She acquires a suitor, damaged veteran Henry, who proves to have secrets of his own. Pa never shows up, and the baby who kept her from roaming farther to find him grows into a 13-year-old whose dreams are at odds with hers. Yet we never doubt Harriet will seize as much satisfaction as this hard life can spare.
Difficult, but worth it for a marvelous heroine with an iron will and a unique voice.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8032-2682-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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