A somber and surprisingly dry Wild West tale.
A portrait of the world-famous, short-lived outlaw and the milieu that created his myth.
For veteran novelist Hansen (She Loves Me Not: New and Selected Stories, 2012, etc.), Billy the Kid was one part angry gunslinger, one part victim of circumstance: the late-19th-century New Mexico territory was so ill-governed, he argues, that the Kid was no more lawless in many ways than the ostensible lawmen. Indeed, he wasn’t born violent: his preferred crime early on was horse thievery, his chief talent was wily escapes, and his first killing was arguably self-defense. But he soon fell in with a gang of fellow thieves and became entangled in the Lincoln County War, in which rival businesses’ scrabbling for authority devolved into gunplay. “It was a collective thing, but only Kid Bonney got accused of the murders,” the unnamed narrator explains after one gunfight ended, typical of his mythos. The Kid’s perceived criminality was a function of who was in charge; the territory’s governor, Lew Wallace, promised the Kid a pardon but was too distracted by the epic Christian novel he was writing, Ben-Hur, to protect him from Pat Garrett, another outlaw who wound up wearing a sheriff’s badge. Hansen has done his research, which is often to the novel’s detriment—the Lincoln County War involved a raft of characters, and he doesn’t always do much to color them. The Kid, too, is often a disappointingly vague figure, a handsome scrapper talented at escapes and charming with women but hard to get a bead on. The novel’s strength is its understanding of the fluidity of authority in “a West where judgments of legality go to the highest bidder or at the insistence of a gun.” By the end of the novel (and Billy’s brief life) it’s clear he hasn’t gotten an entirely fair shake. But the novel reveals more of the territory’s character than its occupants’.
A somber and surprisingly dry Wild West tale.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2975-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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