A sobering tale of women abused by a man and a faith that demanded total obedience. Still, lacking Lee’s own testimony, the...
A subtle and powerful, if incomplete, indictment of a man and a sect as three wives recall their husband, the Mormon leader executed for his role in the notorious 1857 Mountain Meadow Massacre, where emigrants from Arkansas were murdered by Mormons and their Native American allies.
At times, the numerous evocations of the scenery of the Southwest cloy, but the landscape, austerely beautiful and often merciless, also shapes responses and encourages a toughness of mind and heart, as well as an abiding faith. Beginning in 1877, when the charismatic John Doyle Lee is executed by a firing squad at the site of the massacre, the wives each begin offering up their different takes on Lee. English-born Emma, waiting at a ferry on the Colorado for news of his execution, recalls how she came to Utah and met Lee. Smitten, she readily agreed to marriage, but, as one of his 19 wives, found life in his settlement in southern Utah more difficult than she had expected. Her faith soured when she saw the clothing of the massacred parceled out among the Mormon families and observed the traumatized children who had survived the shootings. Wife Ann, a free spirit, recalls her hard life after she decided to leave Lee and her children to travel, often disguised as a man. She believes him guilty, for as a child she saw him kill an innocent man. Third wife Rachel proudly recalls how she became one of Lee’s earliest conquests and how she accompanied him to prison, believing him innocent. As Emma, still in love with Lee, grieves, she begins to make a new life; Ann continues her wanderings; and Rachel struggles to feed her family in a desert outpost.
A sobering tale of women abused by a man and a faith that demanded total obedience. Still, lacking Lee’s own testimony, the ghastly event is only partially explained. Freeman (A Desert of Pure Feeling, 1996, etc.), a former Mormon herself, has done better.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-42092-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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