A transformative tale of personal reinvention from a masterful storyteller.
In Huffman’s novel, a young man unwittingly endangers himself and his friends as they retrace a relative’s journey through Utah taken the previous century.
The novel explores two moments in a family’s history, taking place 112 years apart, both concluding in violence. Their convergence point is a young man named Tom Sullivan, who, in the early 1980s, works at a sporting goods store in Golden, Colorado, and hangs out with a salesman and Vietnam veteran named Jack Elmore, drinking in Jack’s garage. Jack has another friend he looks in on, the more opaque and laconic Frank, also a Vietnam vet. The men are paid a visit by Susan Kingsley, an acquisitions assistant specialist at the Smithsonian Museum, and by her ex-husband, Andrew Harrison, an unfaithful and ill-tempered junior FBI agent jealous that Susan’s career’s star might ascend before his. Susan’s on the trail of some letters that might shed light on how Mormons and Native Americans procured the rifles that were used in a massacre of over 100 emigrant travelers journeying through Mormon country in 1879. Those original letters have just been sent to their rightful heir: Tom. As Tom, Jack, and Frank head off on a fishing trip in which they also seek the homestead of William Mitchell, the writer of the letters, Susan follows in their wake, in search of history. And Andrew follows her, in search of revenge for the pall their divorce has cast over his job. In the retelling of William Mitchell’s covered wagon journey to Utah, frontier violence is a way of life; in the late 20th century, the violence is personal. The closing third of the novel ramps up the suspense in both timelines, conveyed in gorgeous prose and featuring rich character development. Both stories’ conclusions are emotionally affecting and unexpected. This irresistible novel manages the curious trick of making the reader want to stand up and cheer when a woman rides up on horseback in the middle of nowhere and says, “Afternoon, gentlemen. I’m Susan Kingsley with the Smithsonian Museum.”
A transformative tale of personal reinvention from a masterful storyteller.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9798988861300
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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
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
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