This first of a trilogy is more L’Amour entertainment than Lonesome Dove epic, but it’s good fun nonetheless.
The Wild West comes alive in this novel of prospectors, desolate cavalry posts, rotgut saloons and Apache raiders.
Cash McLendon is an orphaned street urchin in pre–Civil War St. Louis who catches the eye of a local robber baron, Rupert Douglass, who puts him to work as spy, fixer and bagman. The opportunistic Cash does the job expertly, so Douglass, intent on preserving his empire, offers his mentally unstable daughter, Ellen, to Cash in marriage. Cash takes the Faustian bargain in spite of his love for Gabrielle Tirrito, an immigrant Italian storekeeper’s daughter, but Douglass decides to insure the contract by driving the Tirritos from St. Louis. Shortly after the marriage, Ellen commits suicide. Cash, fearing Douglass’ retribution, flees St. Louis for the silver mining camp of Glorious, Ariz., where the Tirritos established another store. Seeking redemption, Cash remains in the mining camp even after Gabrielle rejects him. Gabrielle comes across as too saintly, and Cash would need to grow more to be a sympathetic protagonist, but other characters—mainly the townspeople—are realistically drawn, right down to the mayor’s plump wife who eats jelly by the jar. Seeking revenge, Douglass dispatches a 19th-century Terminator type, Patrick Brautigan, who arrives in Glorious to clamp "a meaty hand on [Cash's] shoulder, his thick fingers crushing McLendon’s collarbone." Guinn knows hot, windy, dusty frontier Arizona, from the rattlesnakes of Picket Post Mountain to the ragtag raiding Apache; poorly equipped, understaffed Army troopers charged with riding the land of the marauders; and the rough-hewn prospectors who retreat to adobe saloons featuring warm beer, rotgut whiskey and worn-out women. Although slow to kick into high gear, the plot is classic, with Cash fleeing the St. Louis frying pan only to fall face first into the fiery machinations of another rich rogue—a rancher who wants to control Glorious and siphon off its riches.
This first of a trilogy is more L’Amour entertainment than Lonesome Dove epic, but it’s good fun nonetheless.Pub Date: May 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-16541-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
PROFILES
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
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
PROFILES
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