As characterized here, Becky doesn’t earn the equal time she clamors for.
A supporting character in Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer gets her own novel.
Reviewing her past at 70, Becky Thatcher means to set the record straight. She wasn’t the prissy crybaby portrayed in her old schoolmate Sam Clemens’s bestselling book. She wasn’t just rascally Tom Sawyer’s schoolyard crush—she was his lover and the mother of his child. She was a tomboy who snuck out at night to tail Tom and Huck Finn on their mischief missions around Hannibal, Mo. And Clemens got it wrong about that graveyard murder. Muff Potter, not Injun Joe, was the culprit, and Becky’s first rupture with Tom happened because he inculpated Joe. Grown-up Becky marries Tom’s cousin Sid. Tom pilots riverboats and Huck skulks around Hannibal, a human cipher. When Sid enlists to fight, and Missouri is ravaged by Civil War shortages and marauding gangs, Becky helps her father, Judge Thatcher, escape arrest for treason. Her infant son Tyler has died, leaving only Gage, her son conceived in a tryst with Tom—a secret she withholds from Sid. Dressing as a soldier, Becky follows the troops and rescues Sid. On their return to Hannibal they witness a steamboat explosion in which Tom is lost. The couple head west to join the Nevada gold rush. Sid discovers a rich silver vein, but is killed by vigilantes. Now a wealthy widow, Becky journeys with Gage and her new daughter by Sid to San Francisco. Encouraged by Sam, she becomes a newspaperwoman. But Becky still yearns for Tom and regrets deceiving Sid. A telegraph from Hannibal reveals that Tom is alive, but desperately ill in Panama, where he and Huck had gone for their latest adventure. Becky must follow them one last time. Feisty Becky and charismatic Tom are still, in Hart’s retelling, unable to transcend their Twain-fostered public images. Huck’s best friends ultimately appear to be as unknowable as he is.
As characterized here, Becky doesn’t earn the equal time she clamors for.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37327-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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