As characterized here, Becky doesn’t earn the equal time she clamors for.
A supporting character in Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer gets her own novel.
Reviewing her past at 70, Becky Thatcher means to set the record straight. She wasn’t the prissy crybaby portrayed in her old schoolmate Sam Clemens’s bestselling book. She wasn’t just rascally Tom Sawyer’s schoolyard crush—she was his lover and the mother of his child. She was a tomboy who snuck out at night to tail Tom and Huck Finn on their mischief missions around Hannibal, Mo. And Clemens got it wrong about that graveyard murder. Muff Potter, not Injun Joe, was the culprit, and Becky’s first rupture with Tom happened because he inculpated Joe. Grown-up Becky marries Tom’s cousin Sid. Tom pilots riverboats and Huck skulks around Hannibal, a human cipher. When Sid enlists to fight, and Missouri is ravaged by Civil War shortages and marauding gangs, Becky helps her father, Judge Thatcher, escape arrest for treason. Her infant son Tyler has died, leaving only Gage, her son conceived in a tryst with Tom—a secret she withholds from Sid. Dressing as a soldier, Becky follows the troops and rescues Sid. On their return to Hannibal they witness a steamboat explosion in which Tom is lost. The couple head west to join the Nevada gold rush. Sid discovers a rich silver vein, but is killed by vigilantes. Now a wealthy widow, Becky journeys with Gage and her new daughter by Sid to San Francisco. Encouraged by Sam, she becomes a newspaperwoman. But Becky still yearns for Tom and regrets deceiving Sid. A telegraph from Hannibal reveals that Tom is alive, but desperately ill in Panama, where he and Huck had gone for their latest adventure. Becky must follow them one last time. Feisty Becky and charismatic Tom are still, in Hart’s retelling, unable to transcend their Twain-fostered public images. Huck’s best friends ultimately appear to be as unknowable as he is.
As characterized here, Becky doesn’t earn the equal time she clamors for.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37327-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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