A must-read for fans of the Old West.
The third book in Wilcox’s (Gone West, 2014, etc.) historical fiction series finds dentist Doc Holliday heading to Tombstone, Arizona, to meet up with Wyatt Earp and his brothers for gunfights and adventures.
By 1879, John Henry “Doc” Holliday had been all over the Old West. But it was in Tombstone that he met his destiny in a brief gunfight that would go down in American history as the Gunfight at the OK Corral. However, the reasons why he was in Tombstone and what happened after are the real meat and potatoes of this third and final book in Wilcox’s three-part Southern Son series chronicling Holliday’s life. The first book, Inheritance (2013), focused on Holliday’s Georgia boyhood and how he struggled with an emotionally distant father and his unrequited love for his cousin Mattie. Book 2, Gone West (2014), traced Holliday’s travels throughout the West and demonstrated how the young dentist became a gambler and friend of Wyatt Earp. By the time the third book begins, John Henry has matured into the legendary Doc Holliday, consumptive dentist and dead shot with a pistol. Holliday (as well as the Earps) came to Tombstone because of its rich silver mines, though he soon got caught up in the politics that led to the shootout. Wilcox wisely doesn’t make the OK Corral the climax of the story but merely another episode in Holliday’s eventful life, since much came after that, including his trial and the Vengeance Ride. Wilcox, who spent 18 years researching her subject, brings Holliday to life with astonishing clarity, a notable achievement given how he’s usually a shadowy supporting figure. Through his on-again, off-again relationship with Mattie-substitute Kate Elder, Wilcox is able to get inside Holliday’s head and show readers the mass of contradictions and emotional pain within this Southern gentleman–turned–gambler/gunfighter. Adding to the enjoyment is a smattering of authentic period language: cows aren’t watched, they’re “worried at,” and gun-toting men frequently refer to “being heeled.”
A must-read for fans of the Old West.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-908483-61-4
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Knox Robinson Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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