An immersive novel of the American Indian Wars.
Farmer chronicles the life and career of an Apache renegade in this historical Western novel, the first in a series.
Arizona, 1871: When Ohyessonna is 11 years old, many of the women and children of his tribe are massacred in their home camp by a raiding party of Tohono O’odham, Mexican, and American vigilantes. Ohyessonna and his family, who were out gathering food in the hills, survive the slaughter and retreat with the remaining tribe members into the mountains, from where they launch a series of revenge raids against the White Eyes (whites) in the area. Ohyessonna learns to shoot arrows and guard horses, and by the time he’s 14, he’s a crack shot with a Winchester. One day, a Blue Coat rides into camp looking for a good shot to help him with his work on the San Carlos Reservation. “This is a man I should study,” thinks Ohyessonna. “He can teach me much about White Eyes and how they do things, things I need to know and understand.” Under the tutelage of Teniente Beauford, and later U.S. Army Chief of Scouts Al Sieber, Ohyessonna learns the ways of the White Eyes—but when his people come under the oppression of the same Blue Coats he’s sworn to serve, he chooses the former. Under the new name of the Apache Kid, the outlaw Ohyessonna ranges across the Southwest, attempting to elude a death sentence for himself and his tribe’s way of life. Narrated from Ohyessonna’s perspective, Farmer’s story adopts the Apache’s sense of geography, history, and time, as well as his plainspoken diction: “Though scarred in his face, an eye sagging in the scar from his fight with a bear in his young-man days, but its vision still good, Loco was no man’s fool.” The book covers a fascinating period of history, and Ohyessonna embodies its painful contradictions. Nevertheless, one wishes Farmer offered more of a sense of his protagonist’s interiority, which may have helped to balance out the novel’s strenuous pace.
An immersive novel of the American Indian Wars.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9798892990264
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Hat Creek
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.
Who was Shakespeare?
Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name, “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. Melina’s story is less vivid: Where Emilia found support from the witty Christopher Marlowe, Melina has a fashion-loving gay roommate; where Emilia faces the ravages of repeated outbreaks of plague, for Melina, Covid-19 occurs largely offstage; where Emilia has a passionate affair with the adoring Earl of Southampton, Melina’s lover is an awkward New York Times theater critic. It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life.
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780593497210
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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