A sometimes-engaging tale that’s loaded with trivia for students of the great Western expansion.
Miller’s debut historical novel follows a girl’s 2,000-mile journey from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon City.
Nine-year-old Margaret “Mollie” Ann Reynolds and her younger sister, Sarah, were raised on their parents’ 160-acre farm outside the small town of Mexico, Missouri. It was a generally happy life until September 1853, when their father, Ransom Arnold Reynolds, fell off a barn roof and succumbed to his injuries. Without him, the farm is more than his widow and two young daughters can effectively manage. Several months after Ransom’s death, Col. William C. Masters holds a meeting in Mexico, recruiting families for an Oregon-bound wagon train that he’s organizing. Much to Mollie’s delight, her mother agrees to sell the farm and ready her small family for the arduous journey west, accompanied by Mollie’s 16-year-old friend Billy Jacobs. After months of preparation, the 40-wagon caravan heads out on the Oregon Trail on May 1, 1854. Miller has Mollie narrate this adventurous tale in two alternating voices—as an adult in 1883 and as a child in daily diary entries that she kept while on the trail. Overall, the novel focuses more on hard facts than it does on emotion, although Mollie certainly displays the exuberance of an optimistic child who’s having a life-changing experience. As such, the author offers an abundance of intriguing historical information. Col. Masters, for instance, is presented as an experienced wagon master with exacting standards; among his requirements is that wagons must be pulled by oxen, not horses: “The reason is that horses cannot flourish on the poor grass over the trail nor can they provide enough strength for the mountains we need to cross.” Miller excels at getting across this sort of detail—although it isn’t all equally riveting. Uncredited, full-color photos of campsites and landmarks are interspersed throughout the narrative.
A sometimes-engaging tale that’s loaded with trivia for students of the great Western expansion.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-70407-000-1
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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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