A deftly told story of the difficulties that come from living close to the wild.
Heacox’s novel follows three overlapping lives in a remote Alaskan town.
Salt d’Alene is a devout Christian and former trapper who lives with his family in the coastal Alaskan village of Strawberry Flats. He’s trying to provide for his wife, Hannah, and four sons—including Solomon, who has muscular dystrophy—but money’s tight even after working 60 hours a week at a mechanic shop. Salt gets a covert offer that could pay for his son’s medical treatment and requires him to keep an eye on the pack of wolves that’s recently taken up residence near town. The wolves include Silver, a young male with exceptional hunting abilities, even if the rest of the pack fails to appreciate them—a mistake, given how scarce food has become. Eleven-year-old Kes Nash has just moved to her uncle’s compound outside of Strawberry Flats. Her father hasn’t spoken since his Humvee was blown up in Afghanistan—an incident that cost him his legs—and the family hopes time in remote Alaska will help him recover. The community of veterans living there isn’t thrilled when they learn that a road and bridge are planned that will connect Strawberry Flats with the rest of the world—a scheme that will also affect the fate of Silver’s pack of wolves. The novel’s painterly prose evokes Alaska as a place of great beauty and scarcity, where animals of all sorts compete for space and food: “Silver awakens, startled by the moonlight and a deep-throated growling coming from the direction of the dead whale. On his feet in an instant, he travels fast through the shadowed forest….He finds the big male coastal brown bear atop one end of the whale, near the head.” Salt is an especially memorable character of fascinating contradictions. The book mostly manages to overcome the sentimentality of its premise (sympathetic wolf point of view, wounded war veteran) to present a well-plotted tale of frontier utopianism that should appeal to nature lovers.
A deftly told story of the difficulties that come from living close to the wild.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781513139111
Page Count: 304
Publisher: West Margin Press
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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