An imperfect but inspired horror novel set during the Yukon gold rush.
An orphan is recruited to join a band of sex workers headed into Canada’s beastly north in Davine’s historical horror novel.
A gold rush is on in the Klondike, and men are swarming into the cold mountains of northern Canada. Fourteen-year-old Miss Laura was raised in a Catholic orphanage. She knows Miss Laura isn’t her name; it’s just what the Sisters call her. (Try as she might, she can’t remember the real one.) She flees the orphanage one day after sensing a voice calling to her from beyond the fence. During the night she spends in the woods, she encounters a horrible creature: “Something outside moved. It breathed deep and long through no human nose. Sucking and expelling. So great the creature’s weight that though its footfalls were measured and soft there seemed to be a displacement of the very night the beast moved through.” She’s rescued by a young hunter and ends up in the care of the local constable, who puts her in a jail cell with two other troublesome girls: pretty blond Jennifer and dark, surly Vera. The girls give Miss Laura a new name: Eliza Sky. After a night that features a second encounter with the mysterious beast, the constable releases the three girls into the service of Madam Tigra Volana, a woman who’s recruiting “actresses” for her traveling frontier show. Tigra plans to follow the Yukon River north to the boomtown of Dawson City. “It’s as mean as it gets,” she warns. “Don’t be surprised if you find yourself tricking clients double-time just to keep warm at night.” Keeping warm is only one of many concerns on the hard road north through camps and forests, ending at the abandoned theater Tigra mistakenly purchased in the ghost town of Forty Mile. The characters they meet along the way hold plenty of danger, but not as much as the beast that seems to stalk them—a creature the Indigenous Métis people call the Rougarou, or werewolf.
So much about the novel is promising, including its frosty Yukon setting, its supernatural element, and the frontier culture of gold rush prospectors, suppliers, and sex workers. There’s rarely a moment in which readers’ hairs won’t be standing on end. The book would be much better, though, if Davine were not so stingy with information. Key data—characters’ names and motivations, even the setting—is withheld for many pages, making it difficult for readers to orient themselves within the story. The author’s slippery prose style often leads to confusing syntax: “It touched some nerve near her heart and the girl looked down at the door that had saved her from the yet amorphous nightmare that the very people who had inadvertently fed and watered her might have known better the shape of in their final moments. Better the horror of. The pain.” Even so, the book has much to enjoy, especially for fans of historical horror fiction. Davine has no trouble persuading readers that the realities of the time and place—particularly for women—were just as terror-inducing as any supernatural monster.
An imperfect but inspired horror novel set during the Yukon gold rush.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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