A weirdly satisfying and bloody reckoning with some of America’s most shameful history.
A professor unravels a mystery from the darkest depths of the Wild West.
Salvation comes in strange and uncomfortable ways in this ambitious, century-spanning American gothic by Jones, drawing hard from this country’s deep well of trespasses against its Indigenous people. When 42-year-old junior professor Etsy Beaucarne is bequeathed a newly discovered, century-old diary composed by her great-great-great-grandfather Arthur Beaucarne, she thinks the Lutheran minister’s vivid tales about the frontier might finally earn her tenure at the University of Wyoming. As the framing device unfolds, we’re treated to two new narratives, the first being Arthur’s story of his ministry to a troubled Blackfeet Indian named Good Stab and the second being Good Stab’s own record of his long, strange life. “What I am is the Indian who can’t die,” he confesses. “I’m the worst dream America ever had.” Why it’s been such a long and memorable life quickly becomes apparent along with the Blackfeet’s extended teeth and thirst for blood. While a vampire Western could easily have become a farce, Jones crafts it into a rich tapestry that winds around questions of identity, heritage, and historical truth, all pivoting on a real historical atrocity, the Marias Massacre, where almost 200 Native people were murdered by the U.S. Army in January 1870. Jones never takes it easy on the reader but the trust he earns is rewarded in the end. Both Arthur’s and Good Stab’s accounts are authentically painted from their very disparate lives and cultures, so the shift can sometimes be jarring. It’s also a surprisingly slow burn for a tale with a truly visceral amount of carnage. Nevertheless, by the time the book winds back around, it’s as much an autopsy of institutionalized treachery as a demonization of its tragic and terrifying “villain.”
A weirdly satisfying and bloody reckoning with some of America’s most shameful history.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668075081
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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