An immersive novel of the American Indian Wars.
Farmer chronicles the life and career of an Apache renegade in this historical Western novel, the first in a series.
Arizona, 1871: When Ohyessonna is 11 years old, many of the women and children of his tribe are massacred in their home camp by a raiding party of Tohono O’odham, Mexican, and American vigilantes. Ohyessonna and his family, who were out gathering food in the hills, survive the slaughter and retreat with the remaining tribe members into the mountains, from where they launch a series of revenge raids against the White Eyes (whites) in the area. Ohyessonna learns to shoot arrows and guard horses, and by the time he’s 14, he’s a crack shot with a Winchester. One day, a Blue Coat rides into camp looking for a good shot to help him with his work on the San Carlos Reservation. “This is a man I should study,” thinks Ohyessonna. “He can teach me much about White Eyes and how they do things, things I need to know and understand.” Under the tutelage of Teniente Beauford, and later U.S. Army Chief of Scouts Al Sieber, Ohyessonna learns the ways of the White Eyes—but when his people come under the oppression of the same Blue Coats he’s sworn to serve, he chooses the former. Under the new name of the Apache Kid, the outlaw Ohyessonna ranges across the Southwest, attempting to elude a death sentence for himself and his tribe’s way of life. Narrated from Ohyessonna’s perspective, Farmer’s story adopts the Apache’s sense of geography, history, and time, as well as his plainspoken diction: “Though scarred in his face, an eye sagging in the scar from his fight with a bear in his young-man days, but its vision still good, Loco was no man’s fool.” The book covers a fascinating period of history, and Ohyessonna embodies its painful contradictions. Nevertheless, one wishes Farmer offered more of a sense of his protagonist’s interiority, which may have helped to balance out the novel’s strenuous pace.
An immersive novel of the American Indian Wars.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9798892990264
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Hat Creek
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2025
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
This luxurious novel is set to take the world by storm.
The true story of Axis diplomats detained in the U.S. at the start of World War II is transformed into a dazzling historical novel set at a sumptuous West Virginia hotel.
Bestselling YA fantasy author Stiefvater’s adult debut introduces a writer whose prodigious imagination and distinctive prose style have combined to create a novel that will remind readers of why they fell in love with reading in the first place. At its center is the captivating June Hudson, an erstwhile Appalachian orphan who was taken in by the wealthy Gilfoyle family, owners of the Avallon Hotel & Spa, a high-society retreat built over underground mineral springs. At his death, the patriarch bequeathed ownership to his playboy son, Edgar, but made June the general manager, as she had spent her life learning the business—and also shared with Gilfoyle Sr. a rare gift relating to the “sweetwater” springs, a fantastical element of this otherwise realistic novel. Aside from the magical waters and a few other fanciful details, Stiefvater’s fictional world is based on extensive research into high-end hotels of the period, creating a version of luxury so appealing that readers will wish they could check into the Avallon and stay on indefinitely. In fact, the novel revolves around the true meaning of luxury. To June, it has nothing to do with wealth; it is more connected to joy, and to the book’s title: “June had long ago discovered that most people were bad listeners; they thought listening was synonymous with hearing. But the spoken was only half a conversation. True needs, wants, fears, and hopes hid not in the words that were said, but in the ones that weren’t, and all these formed the core of luxury.” Also brilliantly managed is the rest of the ensemble cast: sexy FBI agents; June’s inimitable staff; the delegations of Japanese, Germans, and Italians detained at the hotel, some quite nasty, but among them a strange, special, totally silent child. And on top of all this, a delicious love story!
This luxurious novel is set to take the world by storm.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780593655504
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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