August 22, 2022
McCarthy follows up Wolves of Eden with another tough tale of the Dakota Territory, one as bloody and visceral as a Sam Peckinpah film. It’s 1867 and Irish immigrants Thomas Sugrue and his younger brother, Michael, are mired in a brutal struggle for survival. Both have fled a murder charge in their home country and served with Union forces in the American Civil War. Tom and his lover Sara—who is half French, half Indigenous, and whom Tom recently liberated from abusive captors by more killings—have just rescued Michael from a near-scalping and sure death following a Sioux onslaught at their fort. Over the next few months, a series of events cast the three in sharp relief against a treacherous environment that is as unforgiving as it is lawless: a deadly encounter with a pair of cutthroat fur trappers, a tense dispute with two Crow braves over rights to a pair of elk carcasses, and a final violent reckoning of unresolved grudges from the past at a frontier trading post. McCarthy effectively alternates chapters cobbled from a journal kept by Michael with stark omniscient accounts, thus combining an intimate tone with an unflinching appraisal of the territory’s harsh terms of engagement. This is a solid entry in the revisionist western fiction canon.
September 5, 2022
Boyne delivers a seemingly redundant adult sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, his 2006 YA novel. In the present, 91-year-old widow Gretel Fernsby lives comfortably in her London flat. She then meets new neighbors Alex Darcy-Witt, a movie producer; his emotionally fragile wife, Madelyn; and their nine-year-old son, Henry, who reminds Gretel of her brother who died at the same age 80 years ago. After Gretel senses Madelyn and Henry are being physically abused by Alex, she’s reminded of the evil she faced as a preteen girl when her father was commandant of Auschwitz. Gretel has spent the years since living under a shadow of complicity, which Boyne unfurls in flashbacks. As a young woman in Paris, Gretel is called the “devil’s daughter” and imagines she’ll be executed; and in Sydney, she coincidentally runs into the guard she’d had a crush on back at Auschwitz. As Gretel looks back on her past, she must decide what to do with the threat posed by the icily manipulative Alex, who offers a benign explanation for his violent episodes. Boyne creates vivid characters, but a certain thematic obviousness dilutes the dramatic effect. Fans of the first book may enjoy revisiting the material as adults, but this doesn’t quite land on its own.