A grand immersion in the past.
The lure of the wilderness proves irresistible for a young trapper in this glorious American frontier novel, Burke’s (Black Flies, 2008, etc.) third.
In 1826, civilization ends in St. Louis; beyond is the vast expanse of the prairie. William Wyeth sees in it an invitation. The 22-year-old is looking for adventure, and the fur trade is booming. Wyeth joins a brigade bound for the western mountains, where they will set traps for beaver and muskrat and return with their pelts. The season is interrupted when Wyeth is felled by friendly fire during a buffalo hunt. The incident shatters Wyeth’s illusion that he’s immortal, but his spirits are restored by his fellow trappers’ camaraderie. Recuperating at a U.S. Army encampment, Wyeth meets Alene Chevalier, a part native French-Canadian tanner. After the trapper has another near-death experience, they fall in love, but Wyeth is not ready for domesticity quite yet. The St. Louis dandy Henry Layton is forming a new brigade and offers Wyeth a stake in it. Layton is a complex figure, marvelously well-observed. A bit of a scoundrel, battling his own demons, he is undeniably charismatic. Both Layton and Wyeth will learn that “[t]here is little that ails a man…that is not improved by a season in the mountains.” The second expedition, this one on Crow lands (Layton has negotiated a treaty), is all ups and downs. The overbearing Layton risks a mutiny, but the trappers rally behind him when he fearlessly confronts a British brigade leader. Borders are vague and the expansionist Brits, not the natives, are the enemy. The trappers harvest a record number of pelts, but safe passage back is far from assured. Burke includes fine episodes of derring-do, two involving bears, and there is a thrilling climax, but character is his overriding interest, the way it’s shaped by tests of endurance in magnificent, alien landscapes.
A grand immersion in the past.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-307-90892-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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