A mesmerizing soldier’s tale, grippingly dramatic.
In this historical novel, a Scottish soldier stationed in America meets a mysterious woman who draws him into a dark conflict with Native Americans in the 18th century.
Sara—a lonesome, peripatetic 18-year-old—finds what she’s been searching for: the military outpost where she believes her mother, Elizabeth, died. A weathered, ageless man lives there—he’s cryptically known as the Seer, a hermit with stumps in place of hands. He’s in possession of a book of which she’s heard rumors—an “orderly’s day book,” written in Gaelic by Thomas Keating, a Scottish soldier and engineer dispatched to the outpost to inspect its fortifications. The bulk of Snodgrass’ bewitching novel consists of Keating’s remarkable memoir, conveyed by the Seer to Sara in a deliciously slow march into a brutal past. When Keating comes upon the outpost, Lt. Robbie Stewart, its ranking officer, has already left with 14 of his men on a mission to help the Onagonas, an ancient tribe threatened by its neighbors for planning to leave the region. But Keating does find Elizabeth Cawley—Sara’s mother—bound to a stake, apparently by orders of Stewart, with whom she may have had a romantic relationship. Elizabeth was kidnapped by Native Americans when she was 15 years old after they killed her family, and now her true identity remains muddled, an alienation she shares with Keating: “For one thing, because neither of us belongs here. In this wilderness. Barricaded in this outpost. We were brought here to this frontier by forces totally outside of ourselves. That had nothing to do with us. You in service to your king. Me because my family looked for a new life.”
With artfully executed suspense, Snodgrass unfurls this taut knot of a story. Fearful that Stewart is in trouble, Keating and the next ranking officer, Sgt. Adam MacKenzie, plan to set out in search of him. But another soldier, referred to as Black Duncan and endowed with a kind of premonitory vision, believes danger lurks nearby. Elizabeth is an intriguingly drawn character—readers will be unsure if she is sympathetic, sinister, or some complex amalgam of both. But the author’s writing style can be ponderously leaden. For example, consider Keating’s explanation to his beloved girlfriend, Jean, as to why he feels compelled to sail to America: “ ’Tis the way [philosopher] David Hume describes it. If there can be no knowledge of anything beyond experience, then I need to seek more experience. It is a matter of honor. Of honesty with myself. I need to seek the experiences that will teach me the world is real. So I know I am real. So I know what I think and feel is real.” Nevertheless, Snodgrass does wonders with the virtue of literary restraint—why precisely the men are in such grave danger and who the Seer really is are astonishing revelations and worth suffering the sometimes-overwrought prose.
A mesmerizing soldier’s tale, grippingly dramatic.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 263
Publisher: Calling Crow Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
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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