A quick, pleasant read.
In Karsten’s (Snags and Sawyers: 2000 Miles Down the Arkansas River, 2012, etc.) historical romance, a case of mistaken identity strands a Scottish lass in Colonial Philadelphia.
Impetuous Caroline “Callie” Beaton flees her grandfather’s house in a huff one night, tired of the dull suitors he parades before her. Wandering the docks of Leith, she’s shocked to be bundled into the hold of a ship, mistaken for a young woman who signed a contract of indentured servitude to gain passage to America. Before she knows it, she’s at sea, stranded without anything to prove her true identity; she has no choice but to bide her time until they reach the Colonies, where she can hopefully find a way to contact her family across the Atlantic. Aboard the ship, she befriends other indentured women: blithe, gossipy Peg, and Mary Rawles, whose husband dies during the voyage, leaving her with two small children and a debt to work off. Callie is also drawn to another passenger, handsome Davy McRae, a self-described businessman whose trade remains mysterious. But while she’s attracted to him, getting back home is far more important, and, once in Philadelphia, Callie suffers through her indenture being sold to the Ashers, a wealthy family with a tangled history. The eldest son, Ethan, seems a trustworthy gentleman, and Callie’s overjoyed when he sneaks her paper and ink to write a letter home. Though Ethan promises to send it, there’s no quick reply, and gently bred Callie finds herself working from dawn till dusk, with no thanks from her masters. When the patriarch of the family is murdered, however, she’s the prime suspect and must flee suspicion with none other than Davy McRae. Is their burgeoning romance a distraction from Callie’s homeward mission? Who can she trust in this foreign land? Karsten ably handles the setting, conjuring the sights and sounds of 1754 Philadelphia and the never-ending chores. Callie is likable, if rather too trusting of men, while love interest Davy has a complicated history of his own. Karsten doesn’t break new ground here, but she’s penned an engaging story with some clever plot twists.
A quick, pleasant read.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1458218278
Page Count: 276
Publisher: AbbottPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2015
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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