A zesty, if flawed, historical adventure that’s worth a read to witness the love that the author lavishes on his characters...
In this first novel, Pollock takes his hero from humble beginnings in Colonial America at the end of the 18th century to the Sandwich Islands, where he becomes a warrior in the service of Kamehameha the Great, the founder of the Kingdom of Hawaii.
Zachary Bower is born in a cabin on the frontier of the British colonies, not long before the start of the Revolutionary War. After the death of his mother, he’s sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Connecticut. His uncle Israel is the captain of the Setauket, a far-ranging merchant ship. Soon, young Zachary ships off with Israel’s crew, learning the ropes while heading to Spanish California. On shore leave in San Diego, he gets left behind and impressed onto another ship that’s heading to the Sandwich Islands. Here, the real adventure begins—as if rounding Cape Horn weren’t hair-raising enough. Zachary’s new vessel, the Fair American, is captured by the island’s residents, and only he and the first mate survive. Soon, along with a seaman from their sister ship, they find themselves the captives of the great leader Kamehameha—a well-known historical figure. Zachary, however, is fictional, as is Kaleo, a young Hawaiian who becomes Zachary’s minder and mentor; the comely Pua Lani, who becomes Zachary’s common-law wife, is also a product of Pollock’s pen. As Kaleo and Zachary become close friends, the latter proves to be a fearsome warrior in Kamehameha’s campaign to unite the people of the archipelago. The descriptions of the fighting are unbelievably savage and bloody, but finally result in sufficient victories and a peaceful interlude. Zachary becomes a father, and he’s accepted among the members of his new society (they call him “Koa Kai,” or “Sea Warrior”), and he’s also found peace within himself. The story doesn’t end there, but suffice it to say that some readers will find the final resolution to be very satisfying, while others may feel that Pollock caved to the temptation of providing a happy ending. The author, in his bio, notes that he’s been “an avid sailor for over fifty years” and his details of a ship’s rigging and maneuvers, and of sailing a vessel through horrendous weather, have the air of verisimilitude. He also fruitfully contrasts Zachary’s straight-laced Christianity with the life of the islanders. For example, Pua, at Zachary’s suggestion, simply agrees to be monogamous and live with him, but Zachary sometimes finds himself struggling with Christian guilt. The sailing scenes are truly riveting throughout, and readers will get a real feeling for the island paradise, with its mix of the idyllic and the brutal. That said, despite the author’s clear investment in this historical material, the text often suffers from idiosyncratic punctuation, as well as erroneous word choices or misspellings, such as “lien-to” instead of “lean-to,” “shuttered” instead of “shuddered,” and “windless” instead of “windlass.”
A zesty, if flawed, historical adventure that’s worth a read to witness the love that the author lavishes on his characters and their adventures.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4808-5934-0
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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