Every Little Thing About You

June 1, 2000
%% This is a multi-book review: SEE also the title "Suhay, Lisa." SEE the title "Ammerman's Longshot joins his Rain from God (1997) and The Ransom" for next imprint and review text. %%Ammerman's Longshot joins his Rain from God (1997) and The Ransom (1997) in a nonsequential, obsessively researched series, The Cross and the Tomahawk, about the Narragansett Indians of mid-eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. Drawing from primary sources, he fashions young Christopher Long from Christopher Gist, a Boone-like explorer and lay Anglican minister who is commissioned by the Ohio Company to establish a settlement in the wilderness. Christopher takes along his wily Narragansett friend, the great horseman and possible witch doctor Caleb Hobomucko, on an adventurous trip westward into the territory of James Fenimore Cooper, except that Ammerman writes lyrically and creates memorable characters. An impressive addition to an impressive series of novels.Fool's Gold features the God-fearing, seemingly foolhardy family of Orion Tower ("O. T.") Skinner. They are pilgrims bound for California after a tornado wiped out what little they had back East; they only mean to pass through Goldfield, Nevada--the site, in 1905, of the last great American gold rush. The entire family seems determined, in the name of Jesus, to give away its last morsel of food or drink of water to the most dubious desert wayfarers, but O. T. steals the show. He specializes in the ignorance that confounds wisdom, often amusingly, but his naivete, reminiscent of Jeeter Lester's in Tobacco Road, always results in good. Bly's first entry in the Skinners of Goldfield series is disarming and gentle, his best work since his witty Code of the West series.Ingermanson's first novel, Transgression, is a clever thriller set in contemporary and first-century Jerusalem. Ingermanson, a physicist, creates a dreamy alter ego in Ari Kazan, an orthodox Jew of lapsed faith who has been working on a time machine. Ari finds himself falling in love with Rivka Meyers, a Messianic Jew. He dives through a wormhole to join her in the time of Paul, where Damien West, Ari's dishonest compatriot, has sent her as part of his mission to kill Paul. West has determined, with the aid of that great scholar, the Unabomber, that without Paul there would have been no Christianity, thus he wants to assassinate him. Ari is in partial agreement because he also feels that Paul brought down eons of persecution upon Jews, but his own ethical sense and love for Rivka enlists him in her cause, finally; and both work to save Paul. The novel's conclusion reflects the author's ambivalence over the question of whether history can be changed. In any case, Ingermanson is an amusing and original new voice, and his knowledge of the shadowy first century is amazing.In Kirkpatrick's All Together in One Place, Mazy Bacon comes kicking and screaming along on the Oregon Trail when her husband, Jeremy, sells their Wisconsin farm. Eventually, the two reconcile, but this tempestuous marriage forms the heart of Kirkpatrick's by turns tender and brutal look at how it must really have been to head West in 1850, under threat of Indian attack, treachery from other pioneers, and the unrelenting weather. Kirkpatrick insists on real characters: fallible men, headstrong women. There's the romantic Tyrell, who quickens the pulse of young girls, and the stridently independent Ruth Martin, who might be a contemporary woman. Romances wax and wane. Children get sick, and there isn't enough to eat. There's mud everywhere. But faith, subtly and genuinely evoked in the award-winning Kirkpatrick's hands, brings the pioneers all together in one place.The Black Rood is the second in...