Selena Fails to Capture Her Spark

 SELENA (1997)

Written and directed by Gregory Nava

Warner Brothers, 127 minutes, PG

★★

 

Thirty-one years after her murder, Selena Quintanilla Pérez remains the most popular Tejano singer of all-time. The Hollywood movie Selena is a recounting of her life–just not a very good one.

 Let me state from the outset my non-familiarity with arena-style Tejano music. I’m also fuzzy on how Tejano music differs from Norteña/o music other than the first is Tex-Mex and the other Mex-Tex. I know more about acoustic musicians like Tish Hinjosa (one of the nicest people on the planet), Carrie Rodriguez, Eliza Gilkyson, and Nanci Griffith. I state truth, not cultural insensitivity, when I say that it’s all Border music to my ignorant ears. My idea of a Border superstar is Linda Ronstadt. Okay, so I’m wrong about that!

Selena sent me to YouTube where I grasped her appeal, but it doesn’t change the fact that the movie is as flat as Panhandle Texas. It’s as if Director Gregory Nava, who also wrote the script, assumed that audiences would fill in the cinematic holes with preexisting reverence. Many viewers no doubt did so–and the movie made money– but most of Selena is a standard music biopic with all that genre’s strengths (the music) and all its weaknesses. (When was the last time you saw one that did not delve into the pitfalls of celebrity?)   

 Selena takes us from Selena’s childhood to her murder on March 31, 1995. Adult Selena is played by Jennifer Lopez; her childhood self is represented by young actor Becky Lee. You could get the gist of Selena’s bio by skimming Wikipedia, but I’ll save you the trouble. She was born in Texas and died there just 23 years later. Stage mothers are infamous in the entertainment field, but, Marcella Quintanilla Pérez (Constance Marie) was too busy keeping her music-obsessed husband Abraham (Edward James Olmos) from bankrupting the family through his own dreams of stardom. Abe had a band called The Dinos, but it played American doo wop and pop rather than Tejano material favored by Latinos in Gulf Coast Texas. Selena loved to sing even as a child and her precocious talent plowed a different road to fame, a family band with Selena as the frontwoman of a flashy, high-energy Tejano repertoire. The film opens with Selena thrilling a sold-out concert at the Houston Astrodome. 

 Then we back up in time to observe how the band Selena y Los Dinos came together. It consisted of Selena, her sister Suzette (Jackie Guerra), brother A.B. (Jabob Vargas), dad, and sometimes mom. Selena was the star, but her greatest skill was manipulating Abraham into dumping doo wop, moving to Corpus Christi, taking long bus tours to build audiences, hiring former heavy metal guitarist Chris Pérez (Jon Seda) to play blistering leads, allowing her to follow her own fashion muses (including wearing a bustier on stage), and blessing her elopement to Chris. Selena sang her family into fortune and became a Grammy Award-winning Tejano superstar. Selena even had her own boutique, salon, and merchandise stores that indirectly led to her death. A friend and superfan, Yolanda Saldívar (Lupe Ontiveros), was hired to keep track of merch and keep the books, but rancor ensued when it became obvious that Yolanda had been dipping her fingers deep into the family till. Her firing led to a meeting that ended with Yolanda fatally shooting Selena. (Yolanda is serving life with the possibility of parole.)

 It was a senseless killing, but we’ve seen this kind of biopic so many times that it’s nearly obligatory that the titular celebrity must die. To sustain what we already know will happen, more is needed. Lopez is perfectly fine as Selena, but the rest of the cast is too mannered and wholesome for its own good, including Olmos who is usually compelling. Selena’s family, even bullheaded Abraham, come off as a fluffier version of The Jackson Five. I couldn’t stop wondering who this script was for, Anglos or Mexican Americans; surely racism, language barriers (in Mexico), and Abraham's rigid Jehovah's Witness faith warranted more than a proverbial drive-by.  Aside from a stage set malfunction, Selena’s struggle to learn Spanish, and Yolanda’s rampage, there was very little grit to the film. Eleven years on the road and these and family feuds are all you’ve got? Bidi, bidi, bom(b) bom(b).

 Rob Weir

Fackham Hall a Hilarious Parody of Downton Abbey

FACKHAM HALL (2025)

Directed by Jim O’Hanlon

Bleeker Street, 97 minutes, R (language, crude humor, language, innuendo)

★★★★★

 

 

 

 

Assuming you’re not one of those Downton Abbey fans that is so enamored that you can brook no criticism of it, Fackham Hall is a must-see satire. It’s a silly venture into lowbrow humor that’s akin to watching an old Henny Youngman performance, meaning that you will laugh yourself stupid despite thinking you shouldn’t. Think Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs crossed with Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Airplane and you’re on the right track. You’d not be wrong to assume a backhand slap at Julian Fellowes, the aristocracy-loving British writer who reminds me of Python’s “Upper-Class Twit of the Year” sketch. I’ve not laughed so hard at a comedy film in years.

 

We meet young pickpocket Eric Noone (Ben Radcliffe)–read “no one”–plying his craft on a London Street before ducking into his Catholic orphanage. A nun hands him a letter and offers him money to deliver it to Fackham Hall. After conning her into giving him a full British pound, he bicycles on his way before being smashed into by a car driven by Rose Fackham (Thomasin McKenzie). Watch how he parks his broken bike. I should mention that you should pay attention to everything in this film: things in the background, posters on the wall, road signs…. Even the video box bears the slogan, “Born to Aristocracy. Bred for Idiocy.” The gates to Fackham Hall proclaim incestus ad infinitum. One might suppose the Davenport family patriarch Lord Humphrey Davenport (Damian Lewis) is the dimmest bulb in the socket, but that would be shortsighted. He and his wife Lady Prudence (Katherine Waterson) are obsessed with marrying eldest daughter Poppy (Emma Laird) to a cousin who’s not too closely related as to invalidate the marriage. That’s because their three sons were lost in World War I, as we find out from hilarious scrapbook clippings. Also lost was Cousin Nathaniel “who was just a boy” when he too was lost. (We see him as a child in the trenches banging grenades together!) His mother Rose (Hayley Mills!), who narrates the film has spent the years since the war as a sourpuss crank.

 

There is, naturally, house staff. The butler Cyril (Jim McMullen) is a stiff who is a spot-on sendup of Downton’s Mr. Carter, and Mrs. Edna McAllister (Anne Maxwell) sort of channels Mrs. Hughes—if she had been vaccinated with a meanness serum. The vicar (Jimmy Carr) called upon to marry Poppy to the only eligible Davenport nitwit available, Cousin Archibald (Tom Felton), comes close to stealing the comedy script and running away with it via his act of saying aloud what’s in his subconscious before correcting himself by looking at the actual words from the wedding ritual! And what’s a wedding without loads of toff guests? There is Darvish Khalid (Ramon Tikaram) who acquired a limp during the war, but not for the reasons you would think; J. R. R. Tolkien (Jason Done), who has been working on The Hobbit for many years, has learned to speak Orc, and invites everyone to call him, “J.R.R. Tolkien, the Writer;” Bill Bobaggins, who is in love with his donkey, and whose name is among the many things Tolkien appropriates; plus, more people surnamed Davenport than one can imagine. As Poppy and Archie are about to be married, Poppy runs from the church and into the arms of the man she truly loves, a cut straight out of The Graduate. He’s a (night-)soiled bum who operates the local dung wagon. (As we find out later, Archie’s one of 22 times Poppy goes to the altar without getting married!) Poppy was probably right about Archie, though; he makes Lord Humphrey look like Einstein. But Lady Davenport–think Cora Crawley– is desperate to keep Fackham Hall in the family and begins to browbeat younger daughter Rose to marry Archie. In keeping with the Downton parody, Rose is deeply in love with Eric, who plays a Tom Branson/Artful Dodger mashup.

 

Things become a sticky wicket when Lord Humphrey is indeed killed–Archie almost did so in the obligatory “hunting” scene–and Inspector Watt appears to solve the crime and provide fodder for an Abbott and Costello routine. Will all eventually be tea and cakes among the twits? This is one of my favorite five-star terrible movies!

 

Rob Weir

The Snowman a Chilling Novel to Read as Winter Lurks

 

 

 

 

 

THE SNOWMAN (2007)

By Jo Nesbø

Knopf, 512 pages

★★★★

 

  

 

 

Get ready for it, faithful blog readers. I’ve been at the League of Women Voters annual used book sale and came back with a large bag filled with novels of favorite authrors and books I wanted to read years ago but was too busy to get to them. Older books are still good books!

 

I have read several Harry Hole mysteries from Norwegian author Jo(n) Nesbø. Hole might put you in mind of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch in the sense that both work on “cold cases,” serious crimes that were never solved. Both are prone to drinking too much, don’t suffer fools gladly, and have been unlucky in love. Harry Hole is also suspected of being out-of-touch with modern police methods and impossible to manage, hence he’s on everyone’s potential firing list whenever police screwup and the need arises to feed the media or public officials a scapegoat. Hole’s ace in the hole–so to speak–is that he is the only investigator in Norwegian history to have solved a serial killer case. (Being Norway, not the USA, that’s a short list!)

 

Several things rock Harry’s world. First, Katrine Bratt transfers into his cold case group in Oslo. She’s bright, beautiful, and from Bergen, which likes to forget that Oslo is the capital. Bratt exudes an inapproachable iciness and a whiff of (perhaps dangerous) ambition. She’s allegedly married, but seems to be coming on to Harry. Second, Harry’s ex-wife Rakel Fauke whose son Oleg looks upon Harry as a fatherly role model though biologically, he’s from a Russian dalliance before Harry or her current husband. Harry’s heavy drinking is partially linked to Rakel, the great love of Harry’s life who got away. She’s been cheating on husband # 2–with Harry–though she claims she only wants his sexual prowess. (They are Scandinavians, so what can I tell you?) Third, Harry’s drinking makes him seem even more of a dinosaur, something that young homicide cop Magnus Skarre occasionally spills in discussions with Harry’s boss Gunnar Hager. Harry’s always a step or two ahead of them, but he knows his head is on the chopping block.

 

Speaking of which, the first snow of the year leads Harry and Katrine into a missing persons case. Strange noises outside lead Birte Becker to investigate. Her husband is at a meeting, Birte tells her son Jonas to stay inside, and that’s the last she is seen. Did she run away? Unlikely as her pink scarf suddenly appears on the snowman they built and her cellphone is missing. When the ring leads Harry to the snowman, something more ominous is clearly afoot. If there is any doubt, Sylvia Ottersen, the mother of twins, also disappears. Police scouring the woods behind her barn make a gruesome discovery: Sylvia’s severed head upon a snowman’s body. Harry suspects a serial killer and Katrine unearths a pattern of disappearances of women with children 24 years into the past, always at the first snowfall.

 

Don’t be put off by the heft of The Snowman; it’s a twisty mystery with more suspects than a campout of patrons waiting for the mall to open on Black Friday. Several doctors are on Harry’s list, as is a missing Bergen cop, an obnoxious TV host who runs a prostitution ring, and Katrine. Questions abound. Why kill mothers? Why are doctors quiet about their research into rare medical conditions? Why haven’t crime scene forensics found more blood? What’s the significance of the killer’s MO (modus operandi)?

 

I found this novel both gripping and creepy. Perhaps it could have benefitted from judicious editing, as its pattern of “fingering” the wrong person as the Snowman wrong wears thin. Red herrings are standard in mysteries, and there’s always the possibility that the translation into English is to blame, but the quarter of the novel is, at once, thrilling and ragged. It sometimes seems that Nesbø stitched unused ideas into this novel. Two nearly fatal standoffs add tension, but steer The Snowman into adventure-story territory. It might not be a perfect mystery, but you will go through it like loose snow. It’s also far superior to the film made in 2017, which is hard to find, so warm up the cider and hunker down.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Eleanor the Great, or Eleanor the Pretty Good?

 

 

 

 

 

 

ELEANOR THE GREAT (2025)

Directed by Scarlett Johansson

Sony Pictures Classic, 98 minutes, PG-13 (language, inferences)

★★★

 

June Squibb’s later-in-life career was resurrected when she appeared in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska in 2013. She was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress and has been in demand ever since. Some have dismissed her as a sort of Betty White Lite, though Ms. Squibb’s career has been far more substantive. White died at age 99 in 2021, so perhaps it’s time to crown Squibb as the queen of defying ageism, though she prefers pricking its hide with satirical barbs. At the same time, though, questions persist whether she lampoons ageism, or merely supplanted assumptions that the elderly are senile with stereotypes of comical cranks and rebels.

 

Scarlett Johansson made her directing debut in Eleanor the Great with June Squibb in the titular role. She plays Eleanor Morgenstein, a 94-year-old Jewish woman who has returned to New York City (from Florida) because her best friend and roommate Bessie Stern (Rita Zohar) has died. Shall we say that her new roommate, her daughter Lisa (Jessica Hecht), is all the things Bessie was not: pushy, frantic, judgmental, and a terrible listener. Eleanor quickly surmises that Lisa is too busy to pay attention to her, a truth reinforced in flashback sequences in which Bessie pours out her Holocaust survivor’s guilt and pain. Lisa wants her mother to go to the local Jewish Community Center in the belief that it’s simply a benign holding cell for old Jews. (For the record, Ms. Squibb is Jewish, having converted when she married Charles Kakatsakis in 1959.) In a classic screw up, Eleanor accidentally wanders into a support group for Holocaust survivors and, when pushed to speak, appropriates Bessie’s stories as her own, a  feeble and misguided attempt to feel as if she belongs.

 

Eleanor’s moving story–it’s not hers, but her mind is obviously sharp enough to remember and recreate what Bessie told her–makes her an instant celebrity among the group. It also catches the ear of Nina Davis (Erin Kellyman), a college journalism student working through grief of her own; her mother has recently died and she has lost her moorings. Analogous to Lisa, Nina’s father Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a successful-but-harried news anchor. Despite gaps of age, religion, race, and experiences Eleanor and Nina become close friends. In Nina’s eyes, the world-wise Eleanor becomes a mother substitute.

 

All is well until Nina wishes to profile Eleanor for a class project. Eleanor plays her assumed role so well that Nina’s father wants to profile Eleanor for a news story. Nina is hurt as dear old dad is stealing her story and Eleanor reluctantly agrees to go on the air. As generally happens in movies and in life, the bigger the lie, the deeper the hurt, humiliation, anger, and psychological damage is left in the exposure wake.

 

The problem with a story such as this is how to end it. Johannson wiggles out of it, but only in a sort of way that leaves her open to accusations of schmaltz, romanticism, and contrivance. Each is a valid interpretation of Eleanor the Great. Johannson came in for criticism–some of it unkind. I wonder, though, if the larger problem lies in the genre often tagged comedy-drama. It’s hard to laugh your way out of cultural misappropriation, as many have found out when caught lying about combat experiences, family pedigrees, academic honors, or in the case of ex-Congressman George Santos just about everything! Johannsson and script writer Tory Kamen opted for a soft landing that is sentimental in a mawkish way. Isn’t this a circumstance that calls for drama, not smiles and fluff?

 

For all of this, Eleanor the Great ranks at the top end of so-so movies. Squibb is a portrait of being conflicted but naïve, Kellyman is moving as a broken-hearted not-quite-a-woman, and Ejiofor is convincing as the kind of newsman who eats nails for breakfast. In other words, they work well together because each is distinct. I’m not surprised that most critics found it hard to whip up enthusiasm for the movie, or that the box office was less than $5 million. But if we lash our swords to the wall above the fireplace, Eleanor the Great can be seen as Eleanor the Pretty Good.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (2023)

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Apple/Paramount Pictures, 206 minutes, R (violence, language)

★★★★★

 

In the 1920s/30s, Oklahoma’s Osage Indians were the richest people in America. Killers of the Flower Moon reveals the secret of its title in the film’s opening sequence. A medicine man is conducting a ceremony during a flower of the moon ceremony, a coming of spring ritual. In this one, though, there is also a lamentation on the decline of the Osage. As he finishes and shots ring out, one hits a marshy pond, and up from the ground comes a bubbling crude. A 1906 treaty ceded mineral rights to the Osage, and overnight they own one of the richest underground oil reservoirs ever discovered.

 

Killers of the Flower Moon is noteworthy in other ways. It might be the last great film from director Martin Scorsese. It was also a box office bomb for several reasons, not the least of which was Scorsese’s ego. He spent over $200 million dollars on the film and had trouble finding a studio to commit to that sort of budget. Apple Studios finally greenlighted it, but its distribution deal with Paramount Pictures was such that it didn’t stick in theaters for very long. With PR, salaries, residuals, and other costs it needed to yield about $600 million to break even, and its $150 million box office receipts didn’t make a dent in that. It didn’t help that movie was nearly 3 ½ hours long. Many people dodged it for that reason.

 

Yet, Killers of the Flower Moon is one of the best films of the decade. Scorsese wisely based the movie only partly on David Grann’s best-selling book of the same title. Grann focused on how the conning of the Osage gave rise to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The movie pays attention to this, but turns to the trial notes of Thomas Bruce White Senior (Jesse Plemons).  In practical terms this means the production crew fashioned a movie rather than trying to duplicate the totality of Grann’s non-fiction book. Instead, the film centers on the complicated relationship between Ernest Buckhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his Osage bride Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone).

 

Ernest is just back from combat in World War One. In 1919, he visits his brother Byron (Scott Shepherd), who works for their uncle William King Hale (Robert DeNiro). Though the Osage are so rich they buy cars and hire chauffeurs to drive them, they are deemed “incompetents” in need of white legal guardians to “manage” their money. Bryon and Ernest engage in direct robberies of Osage people, but discover that more can be made from graft, a talent at which Hale excels. Because the 1921 Tulsa race riot in which 300+ African American citizens were killed is fresh in everyone’s memories, the Osage seek gentler means of persuasion. But when their agent in Washington, D.C. is murdered and Osage bodies begin to proliferate in Oklahoma, tensions rise. This so-called Reign of Terror left more than 100 suspected murder victims, with roughly a third of them eventually traced to Hale. The movie glosses the extent of these, but zeroes in on Mollie’s family. Among the victims are her mother Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal) two of her sisters, several kin, and nearly Mollie.

 

Ernest marries Mollie, just as Bill Smith (singer Jason Isbell) wedded her sister Reta. These marriages were engineered or approved by Hale, but Hale is given a Svengali-like treatment. Smith clearly cherishes Reta (Ja Nae Collins) as Ernest does Mollie. The open question is whether Ernest loves her more than he is afraid of his uncle. Eventually the Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner of the FBI, gets involved with savvy Native agent John Wren (Tatanka Means), prosecutor Peter Leaward (John Lithgow), and numerous others blowing the lid off the scam and murders. In all, there is a huge cast that includes Brendan Fraser and musicians Charlie Musselwhite, Sturgill Simpson, Jack White, and Peter Yorn in acting roles. Scorsese also included more than three dozen Native Americans in his film.

 

President Calvin Coolidge gets a shout out for supporting the investigation, but I won’t it is an absolute travesty that this film was nominated for ten Oscars and won zero, not even Robie Roberston for Best Original Score. The brilliant Lily Gladstone lost the Best Actress Oscar to Emma Stone, who did little more in Poor Things than appear naked. To use a baseball slogan, they wuz robbed.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Avery, Gottlieb and Rothko in Gloucester

 

 

 

AVERY, GOTTLIEB & ROTHKO: BY THE SEA

Cape Ann Museum

Gloucester, MA (Ending September 27)

 

 

Adolphe Gottlieb "Over and Under" 

  

The above show is likely to end before most of you can get to Gloucester but if you can, be sure to see it. I wouldn’t call it my favorite art show of the year, but it’s certainly high on the list of the most intriguing. 

 

Milton Avery, "Gloucester Dawn," 1921

  

On the surface, these three would seem an unlikely match. Milton Avery (1885-1965) is best known for his throwback pre-Renaissance painting style, one that deliberately flattens the canvas. Avery is one of the preeminent colorists of American painting. There are discernible objects and people on the canvas, but he paid little attention to what their “natural” color should be. Faces are often blank or rendered so quickly that details dissolve into a mass of whatever color he chooses. You can read into them any expression that you wish, but most people say that they evoke calmness. His work is sometimes compared to that of Ernst Kirchner, though to my eye Avery’s work seems joyful and Kirchner’s danger and doom. Avery also painted domestic scenes and collaborated with his artist-wife Sally Michel Avery.

 

 

 

Mark Rothko. Wharf, 1924 

 

The most famous of the trio was Mark Rothko (1903-70) who was also the most polarizing of the three. His earliest inspirations were Paul Klee and Henri Matisse, but he was perhaps even more influenced by psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The stereotype of Rothko, though, is that he only painted colors. Before you actually stand before such works you might think, “What’s the big deal? My 5-year-old could paint a canvas that’s all black.” No; he couldn’t! And no; Rothko was not mono-dimensional. More on this in a moment. 

 

Gottlieb, Boxes on the Beach, 1938

 

 

I confess that the name Adolphe Gottlieb (1903-74) was merely one I ran across from time to time, but knew little about. He was the founder of The Ten, a group that did much to popularize abstract expressionism. His pictographs caught my eye. To me they evince what you might get if you mixed sea motifs with Aboriginal and Japanese art. This, I hasten to add, is my emotional response to his works, not something you’d learn in Art 100.

 

So how do you hang a show of three artists who don’t immediately seem relatable? We can start with the fact that three were great friends. The show in Gloucester is there because all three came to Cape Ann during summers in the 1920s into the 1940s. Why Gloucester? Because it was several of the dozens of art colonies that thrived during the Depression and war years. It’s amusing the think of this now, but locales in the east alone such as Ogunquit, Gloucester, Provincetown, the White Mountains, the Brandywine region of Pennsylvania, Saratoga Springs, the Hudson River Valley, and sections of New York City were filled with artists who came there because they were cheap places to live! If you look in the right places, you can make out small shacks in which they lived (especially in the Perkins Cove section of Ogunquit, Maine).

 

Another important thing to keep in mind is that where artists end up often bears little resemblance to where they started. Avery, Rothko, and Gottlieb were all realists at one stage of their career; all three eventually embraced abstract expressionism, a term whose very ambiguity tells you something. Once one stops trying to paint realistically, new ways of seeing open up. Rothko, for instance, was once a member of the Industrial Workers of the World and could have spent his career as a propagandist. But then he went to Gloucester to paint boats and crashing waters. Next, he was a surrealist, but his career arc was one of simplification. Why not paint three color swatches for a beach, water, and sky?

 

Below I offer several paintings from each artist. I start with the ones that are most “realistic” (another loaded word) and end with one of their later works. Even if you can’t get to Gloucester, you’ll see their work elsewhere. What do they express for you?

 

 

Milton Avery: Confession: He's a favorite of mine! 

 

Portrait of Rothko 1933

 

Shore Sitters, late 1930s

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Mark Rothko

 

 

 

You've seen how he started. What do you make of these?
 

 

 

           

 

Sand, Ocean, Sky

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

Adolphe Gottlieb 

 

Rockport, 1934

Mariners Incantation, 1945

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Forgotten Dream, 1946 

Note: the top photo is a Gottlieb work from 1959 

 

Hidden History Uncloaked in The Night Birds

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE NIGHT BIRDS (2007)

By Thomas Maltman

SoHo Publishing, 370 pages.

★★★★★

 

There are many books named The Night Birds, but the one to read is from Thomas Maltman, which was published in 2007. To call it a different kind of Western doesn’t do it justice.

 

First a quiz: Name the president who declined to stop the largest single-day execution in American history. Answer: Abraham Lincoln. It wasn’t traitorous Confederates dancing on the end of ropes. On December 26, 1862, 38 Dakota Sioux warriors were hanged in response to a clash between Natives and German settlers near Mankato, Minnesota. Maltman uses the Sioux uprising in his work of fiction, but also did his homework. As an old TV series once put, “Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.”

 

Our narrator is Asa Senger, a lonely boy in 1876. An elderly Dakota Sioux man is found near a Kingdom Township home. This touches off fear in the area, though the man is a frail, trader. Minnesota was once a dangerous place for whites to be, even in areas where whites and Natives lived in relative peace. Though Asa was born in a few months after the uprising of 1862, his parents remain wary and retain their animus against the Sioux. Into Asa’s life comes Aunt Hazel, his mother sister. She has been in an asylum for 14 years because of her epilepsy. Bromide had been used to control epilepsy since 1861, but it took years for this knowledge to make its way into remote areas. The Sengers only reluctantly accept guardianship over Hazel and she is mostly confined to an attic room. Asa is warned that his aunt is delusional.

 

Asa, though, grows curious of his aunt, who tells him stories but swears him to secrecy. What tales she tells! At this point I should warn readers that both Germans and the Sioux had a penchant for recycling names, the Germans believing they paid homage to deceased relatives by naming babies after them, and mystical Sioux believing the spirits of the dead can be reborn. Hazel had a brother named Asa who died in the1862 massacre, along with both of her parents. The Senger family lived across a small river from a Sioux encampment and young Hazel slowly cultivated Sioux playmates. Her parents regularly traded with the Sioux. Though suspicious of each other, a fragile truce prevailed. Hazel learned some Dakota and grew close to Wanikiya, a boy roughly her age, who grows up to be an important person amongst the Dakota. Asa also learns that Wanikiya killed his “Uncle Asa” and that Hazel was a captive during the war. Her story is certainly not in keeping with the many so-called “captive narratives” that proliferated from Colonial period through the 19^th century.

 

The Night Birds is a multi-generational family story that, in its own unique way, is a melting pot story. Reading it will enlighten you about American history, peels back hidden cowboys-and-Indians myths, and shows how easy it is for victors to reinvent the past. At a time in which immigrants are imperiled in the United States, it also raises questions about who and what an American is. It is noteworthy that the Senger family had to flee Missouri because of their abolitionist views, yet somehow don’t connect the dots regarding Native Americans.

 

Maltman’s novel is filled with small details that help readers imagine life on the edge of the frontier. Maltman makes us contemplate what it would be like to plow land that has never seen a blade and to live where you nearest neighbors don’t look, dress, or speak like you. He also subtly juxtaposes individuals and circumstances. There is scalping, but it’s often done by white bounty hunters or in war as trophies. In a book in which Young Asa encounters Jesse James, who is a “savage,” the Dakotas who killed Asa’s forebears or the ruthless James-Younger gang?

 

Perhaps it’s best to muse upon the book’s title. The “night birds” are not owls or hawks; they are nocturnal nightjars, small fowl slightly bigger than sparrows who sleep during the day, roost on the ground, and are so well camouflaged you could be on top of one and never see it.  The are insectivores, but their prolonged call and trill is downright eerie. Now think of life with minimal illumination.

 

Forget books with similar titles; this older novel is one of the best books I’ve read this year.

 

Rob Weir