An admirably ambitious if overly upholstered historical yarn.
A Scotsman on the wrong side of history is thrust into the New World.
The title hero of this baggy epic by filmmaker/novelist Sayles is a Jacobite on a futile quest to unseat King George II. After his cohort’s bloody defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, he’s captured by British soldiers, imprisoned, then shipped across the Atlantic and pressed into indentured servitude in Maryland. Meanwhile, Jenny, a farm girl with whom Jamie had a chance encounter during the battle, is similarly taken captive by a French regiment and sent to the island of Martinique. Sayles braids Jamie’s and Jenny’s storylines across more than a decade, culminating in their involvement in the French and Indian War. Along the way, Sayles is expert at describing the tactical elements of the battles (George Washington, then a Virginia regiment commander, plays a minor but key role) and deftly captures the dialects of his characters and the violence they’re subjected to. But Sayles’ chief interest is in how time, place, war, and imperialism at once do violence on bodies and identities. Jamie becomes embedded with the Lenape tribe seeking independence from colonizers, earning the name Long Knife; Jenny, for her part, becomes an eyewitness to the slave trade and seeks her own form of independence. Jamie, denied a sense of home on two continents, exemplifies the discontent that sparked the American Revolution, and Sayles underscores the Native Americans’ disenfranchisement as well. (“If we are not to live on this land…why would we die for it?” one tribal leader says.) Sayles’ style is immersive to a fault, often dragging readers into details of war tactics and walk-on characters, muffling the strength of the story’s two leads. But Sayles makes clear the kind of bigotry and greed they’re fighting against.
An admirably ambitious if overly upholstered historical yarn.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781612199887
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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