by Win Blevins ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2004
The glory years of frontier life, fresh and rich.
A second in the author’s Rendezvous series (So Wild a Dream, not reviewed), about the early days of the fur trade.
Blevins (Westward: A Fictional History of the American West, 2003, etc.) is often mystical when writing about Indians, and his gritty fiction brings to mind the fur-trade novels of Frederick Manfred (Lord Grizzly, 1954) and Vardis Fisher (Mountain Man). In So Wild a Dream, set in the 1820s, Pittsburgh’s white-haired, impressionable young Sam Morgan, finding Pennsylvania dull, lights out for the West, becomes a hand on a riverboat, has many adventures on the frontier, then heads into the unmapped West on a grueling 700-mile trek, alone and on foot, across the Great Plains to the Rockies, where men blaze trails across the mountains. Between Missouri and the Pacific, he falls in with various Indian tribes and learns crafts for living in the wilds. Now, after two years trapping beaver, he goes home, fights with his family, heads back west. Downhearted, he dreams himself joined to a Spirit Buffalo (named Samalo), decides to seek his beloved Indian maiden Meadowlark, and sets off with his pet coyote to find her. Sam and three friends, including Third Wing, a Pawnee, go up Wind River to look for her. Meadowlark is glad to see him, but Sam is humiliated by a Crow archery game that awards him the name No Arrows. Nor can he ride as well as Crow. When another Crow courts Meadowlark, Sam must become a real Crow if he’s to win her, but after he’s captured by Lakota Sioux (and escapes), he’s too poor to woo her. And he’s responsible for a young Crow’s death. Meadowlark’s parents believe a prophecy that White Men will overrun the land: Thus Meadowlark mustn’t marry a White. But soon the Pacific beckons them both.
The glory years of frontier life, fresh and rich.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-765-30574-7
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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by Han Kang ; translated by Deborah Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 2, 2016
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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by Han Kang ; translated by Deborah Smith & Emily Yae Won
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