A poignant, intriguing, and soulful Western with memorable protagonists.
Ill-fated lovers team up to bring a measure of justice to the Wild West in Lederman’s historical novel.
Caleb McRae, born in 1876, is the son of a banker in Greenwich, Connecticut. Handsome, hale, and wealthy, his future seemed secure. But at 18, disturbed by desires he knew were unholy and inspired by dime-store Westerns, he left home for Texas, content to have been disinherited and left to make his own way in the world. He is a man bent on bringing God and justice to the unwieldy West. Caleb joins the Texas Rangers and acquires a stellar reputation, and then, in 1900, his life is forever changed. An outlaw named Henry Midnight is reported to be running roughshod over the territory, stealing cattle and jewels from the wealthy white ranchers. After days of tracking him, Caleb finds Henry weeping next to his beloved Arabian horse, now dead. During the long journey back to El Paso, Caleb learns Henry is the son of a British Peer; like Caleb, Henry found himself entranced by the West, and he has found a home among the Hopi and the Apache (“He’d attended lectures in ethnology at Oxford before coming to the States to study the aboriginal Americans and learn their ways”). He too is seeking justice—for those who were displaced and discarded by the wealthy white invaders. So begins Lederman’s beguiling five-decade-long queer love story about two men committed to their own versions of righteousness and salvation—and, especially, to one another, through both heartbreak and reconciliation. Articulately and sensitively composed, with vivid primary and secondary characters, the narrative contains a satisfying amount of action, including gunfights, brawls, and close calls with the law. But what engages the two avengers (and likely readers as well) most are the bracing intellectual, philosophical, and theological debates they enjoy so thoroughly—Henry counters Caleb’s evangelistic sermons with compelling Hopi mysticism and creation stories. The heavy doses of Christian doctrine that permeate the narrative begin to weigh it down, but the delightfully witty dialogue shared by the two lovers brings refreshing lightness to a complex tale.
A poignant, intriguing, and soulful Western with memorable protagonists.Pub Date: July 24, 2025
ISBN: 9780998603087
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Azure Star, LLC
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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