An often engrossing and well-handled story of the 19th century.
In this historical novel, McIlvain tells a tale of love lost and found during the colonization of Texas in the 1820s.
Susannah Mobley, the white daughter of a country farmer in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, is closer to the enslaved Mama Jess and her son, Philippe, than she is to her own parents. Enslaver Jacob Mobley is a cruel man who treats people, including his daughter, as commodities; Louisa Mobley is often dulled by laudanum. Between 1817 and 1821, the teenage Susannah and Philippe fall in love. Although he tells her that “I’m not strong enough to resist taking you,” she continues seeing him, and they eventually consummate their love out of wedlock. By the time she graduates from New Orleans’ Ursuline Academy in 1821, she’s pregnant with their child. Philippe flees to San Antonio de Béxar in Texas and gives her a ring made of intricately knotted strands of her dark red hair as a sign that he’ll love her forever. To shield Philippe, she claims that the pregnancy is the result of a rape by a runaway enslaved man whom Jacob’s dogs recently killed. Susannah is quickly married to Hezekiah James, a Tennessean on his way to stake a Texas property claim who knows about her pregnancy. During their arduous journey to Texas, they homestead on the Brazos River; Susannah comes to admire and even love Hezekiah for his kindness and leadership. In these pages, McIlvain tells absorbing love stories, but she also explores the interpersonal relationships between enslavers and enslaved people, some of whom grew up together; “We’re like brothers,” says Hezekiah to Mason, a man whom he and his family enslaved. Mason answers that he is, in fact, enslaved to Hezekiah, later adding, “Takes a lot of twisting, Hez, to come up with family.” McIlvain also effectively delves into the friendships that develop between disparate women in a new settlement. Well-known figures from Texas history, including Stephen Austin, Jared Groce, and Baron de Bastrop, make appropriate appearances that add to the book’s feeling of historical verisimilitude.
An often engrossing and well-handled story of the 19th century.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2023
ISBN: 978-4824189271
Page Count: 414
Publisher: Next Chapter
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.
A retelling of Pinocchio from Geppetto's point of view.
The novel purports to be the memoirs of Geppetto, a carpenter from the town of Collodi, written in the belly of a vast fish that has swallowed him. Fortunately for Geppetto, the fish has also engulfed a ship, and its supplies—fresh water, candles, hardtack, captain’s logbook, ink—are what keep the Swallowed Man going. (Collodi is, of course, the name of the author of the original Pinocchio.) A misfit whose loneliness is equaled only by his drive to make art, Geppetto scours his surroundings for supplies, crafting sculptures out of pieces of the ship’s wood, softened hardtack, mussel shells, and his own hair, half hoping and half fearing to create a companion once again that will come to life. He befriends a crab that lives all too briefly in his beard, then mourns when “she” dies. Alone in the dark, he broods over his past, reflecting on his strained relationship with his father and his harsh treatment of his own “son”—Pinocchio, the wooden puppet that somehow came to life. In true Carey fashion, the author illustrates the novel with his own images of his protagonist’s art: sketches of Pinocchio, of woodworking tools, of the women Geppetto loved; photos of driftwood, of tintypes, of a sculpted self-portrait with seaweed hair. For all its humor, the novel is dark and claustrophobic, and its true subject is the responsibilities of creators. Remembering the first time he heard of the sea monster that was to swallow him, Geppetto wonders if the monster is somehow connected to Pinocchio: “The unnatural child had so thrown the world off-balance that it must be righted at any cost, and perhaps the only thing with the power to right it was a gigantic sea monster, born—I began to suppose this—just after I cracked the world by making a wooden person.” Later, contemplating his self-portrait bust, Geppetto asks, “Monster of the deep. Am I, then, the monster? Do I nightmare myself?”
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18887-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
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