Dallas’s sixth (after Alice’s Tulips, 2000, etc.) is as satisfying as a John Ford movie, with just the right touches of...
Varmints and vixens . . . way out west, circa the 1880s.
Addie French was famous for making the best chili in New Mexico before she moved to dusty little Nalgitas and opened a bordello called the Chili Queen. Keeping all those cowboys and miners happy with only three or four whores ain’t easy, and she even takes on a few customers herself now and then. Her only help is a powerfully built black woman who goes by the odd name of “Welcome,” since no one else wants to cook and clean for temperamental prostitutes. But Addie makes enough money to get by and takes her own pleasure with Ned, who’s hiding out at the Chili Queen after several lucrative bank robberies. Addie takes in homely mail-order bride Emma, who was abandoned by Addie’s priggish brother John and left at the depot by the man who was supposed to claim her. She treats Emma as an honored guest, thinking of making her a milliner, since she sews a fine seam. She’s nonplussed, however, when Ned takes a shine to the lonely woman. The three cook up a land-buying scheme to fleece Emma’s brother, but John insists on two conditions: he’ll return to see the land for himself, and he’ll put up only half the purchase price. By now Ned is in love with Emma, who has a magical way of looking pretty when she wants to. He plans another robbery to come up with the other half and swindle John—not realizing he’s already being taken by a pair of bunco artists. Once the double-crossing begins, it doesn’t stop, but even Addie doesn’t realize that Welcome is in on the scam as well. Interwoven are the tragic stories of Emma, John, Welcome, and Ned—providing a look at the darker history of the Old West.
Dallas’s sixth (after Alice’s Tulips, 2000, etc.) is as satisfying as a John Ford movie, with just the right touches of humor and period detail.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-30349-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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