Saul Indian Horse, who tells this story of his life as an Ojibwe living in a non-native society, is in his thirties as the novel opens, and he is at an alcohol rehabilitation facility to which he has been sent by social workers at the hospital where he has been a patient for six weeks. Now alcohol-free for thirty days, he admits that now it is time for his hardest work to begin. “If we want to live at peace with ourselves, we need to tell our stories.” Saul Indian Horse is just four years old in 1957, when his nine-year-old brother Benjamin disappears. His sister vanished five years before. These kidnappings are all part of a brutal program to separate aboriginal children from their families and their culture, send them to a school where they will live apart from everything and everyone they ever knew, and teach them English and the Canadian school curriculum. Ultimately, the goal is to turn them all into “Canadians,” without connections to their aboriginal past. “I saw kids die of tuberculosis, influenza, pneumonia, and broken hearts. I saw runaways carried back, frozen solid as boards. I saw wrists slashed and, one time, a young boy impaled on the tines of a pitchfork that he’d shoved through himself.” These children universally yearn for the freedom to be outdoors in nature, sharing the spirits of the earth and sky which have been so much a part of them until now. Fortunately, Saul Indian Horse is able to find some salvation in all this. St. Jerome’s has a hockey team, and he, at age eight, is desperate to be part of it, though he has never played. For Saul, hockey becomes the equivalent of a natural religion.
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Sebastian Barry’s previous novel, Days Without End, provides the historical background for A Thousand Moons, which features the same characters in a new, later time period (though it is not necessary to have read that book before reading this). In that book, two young, Irish boys, Thomas McNulty and John Cole, stowaways escaping an Irish famine, arrive in the U.S. in the late 1840s and join an Irish regiment in the US Army, where they participate for several years in the Indian Wars throughout the West. While there, they “adopted” Winona Cole, a six-year-old Lakota Indian child following the death of her mother during those wars. Moving to Tennessee just before the Civil War, they live briefly as a family, and during the Civil War, fight on the front against “the Rebs.” A THOUSAND MOONS starts at the conclusion of the Civil War, which does not bring the peace this young family group deserves. Early in this novel, Winona is attacked, beaten, and raped, and she has no memory of who her attacker was. The death of Jas Jonski, a man who had proposed marriage to Win also shows the violence by those in power against anyone who is different, as they try to remake post-war Tennessee in their own image. A former slave who is beaten and robbed of his much loved rifle, and the arrival of another Native American woman, who becomes a friend of Winona, add more drama to this atmospheric saga and its stunning characters. Sebastian Barry creates real people involved in real problems, and he draws in the reader to share in those problems and their triumphs. The climax is unforgettable – a true homage to Barry, his characters, and his thematic messages.
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Although much-loved author Jane Austen is a dominating force throughout this biographical novel by Gill Hornby, most of the action here revolves around Jane’s older sister Cassandra. Closer to Jane than any other family member or friend, Cassandra is privy to every aspect of Jane’s life, living with her and sharing most of her life, including Jane’s final illness when Jane is forty-one. Having previously written The Story of Jane Austen, a biography for young readers, Hornby has obviously “lived with” Jane Austen so intimately, over the years, that readers of this novel may be surprised to learn that the revelatory letters here, purportedly written by Jane Austen or her family, were, in fact, written by author Gill Hornby herself. Through them, she provides insights into the lives of both Cassandra and Jane, and her vibrant details of everyday life bring the society of the era to life. More importantly, however, the author recreates some of the psychological issues with which these women have to contend whenever fate unexpectedly changes their social positions through death, loss of home, or loss of income. By highlighting these issues within fictional letters, Gill Hornby offers insights into social conflicts faced by women and makes them understandable to modern readers – no matter how much the reader might regret some of the actions these characters take to resolve their problems. A lively read, Miss Austen is a significant addition to the world of Jane and Cass Austen and all the mysteries still associated with them.
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Micah Mortimer, the main character of Anne Tyler’s latest novel, her twenty-third, could not be more ordinary, at least on the surface, yet Anne Tyler makes his story one that will keep even jaded readers intrigued and involved in his unexciting life. Already forty-three, he has had his share of girlfriends, and now, “women friends,” since he refuses to refer to women over thirty as “girls.” None of his relationships have evolved into anything permanent, however, nor has he expected them to. “He lives alone; he keeps to himself; his routine is etched in stone.” Finding Brink Bartell Adams, a first semester freshman in college, sitting on his doorstep one morning after Micah finishes his run, comes as a total surprise. Brink, the son of Lorna Bartell, a girlfriend from his distant past, is a freshman in college. He has found Micah’s photo in a shoebox in his family’s house, and is totally convinced that Micah must be his father. At the same time, Micah’s relationship with Cass, his woman friend of the past three years, begins to have trouble. As she has said, “I’m just saying that the you that you are might not be the right you for me.” Anne Tyler develops the story of a boring, unimaginative stick-in-the-mud and turned it into a charming and enlightening story of a man who just may have a chance at real life after all. If it is not too late.
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This deeply affecting and love-affirming novel by Zülfü Livaneli, filled with World War II sadness and guilt, is a powerful story based on a true, nearly unknown tragedy, the sinking of the Struma, an old cattle ship carrying almost eight hundred Jewish refugees in December, 1941. Leaving Romania and headed for Palestine, it was overcrowded, underpowered, and unsafe. Barely arriving in Istanbul after several engine failures on the way from Romania, it waited with all passengers for seventy days, hoping for the necessary visas for Palestine. The British, governing Palestine under a mandate from the League of Nations, were unwavering in their refusal to grant the permits. The Turks, too, feared that the almost eight-hundred passengers would become the responsibility of Turkey if they were released into Turkey, and returning them to Romania was out of the question. Finally, with the Turks and the British at an impasse, the disabled ship and its passengers were towed out of the harbor into the Black Sea and abandoned. The following day, a torpedo, fired by a Russian submarine, obliterated the ship, killing the entire crew and all passengers but one. Turkish author Zulfu Livanelli devotes this novel to the stories, past and present, connected with the Struma, especially the love story of Maximilian Wagner and his bride, Nadia. With its vivid historical setting, believable characters, constant action, and a narrative which moves around in time, even through the worst, even unimaginable, horrors of war, this remains a narrative in which love still, somehow, survives.
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