A joy to read.
A young African girl with seerlike awareness of the past comes of age.
Before Ayosa Ataraxis Brown was born, no more than “a wriggling thing, unbound, light as a Sunday morning thought,” she was granted access to the traumatic, layered memories of her mother’s past. Fittingly, a kind of strife has always marked Ayosa’s relationship with her mother, Nabumbo Promise, a mercurial photographer who shares her daughter’s willful spirit and is disturbed by the girl’s preternatural knowledge. Now almost 13, Ayosa lives alone in the small village of Mapeli Town in a manor that belonged to her great-grandmother—an Englishwoman named Mabel Brown whose wealth spurred the town’s founding—while Nabumbo Promise disappears on work assignments for months on end. As Ayosa awaits her mother’s return with a mix of love and anger, ever wary of body-snatching wraiths that might impersonate Nabumbo Promise, she whiles away time with the enigmatic neighbors—Sindano, the owner of a visitorless cafe, and Jentrix, the town’s apothecary—who provide clues into the Brown family’s deep links with the town’s traumas; she also forms a powerful bond to free-spirited Mbiu, a motherless girl who observes Ayosa through the manor’s windows. Nabumbo Promise returns at last, but her relationship with Ayosa grows thornier as the two clash over the painful rifts in their relationship and Nabumbo Promise begins to detach from reality. Debut author Oduor renders this fantastical world so tangibly it almost leaps off the page—a feat aided by her stunning language: A hornet’s nest is an “enormous papery capsule writhing above them, full of murder and full of nectar”; Ayosa experiences “nights where her body unravel[s] from itself like yarn from a spool.” There’s a complex emotional current animating Ayosa’s relationship with her mother as the two vacillate between disdain and desperate, intense love, lending the narrative a sense of momentum and depth. Though sometimes strained by an abundance of colorful characters, this novel is lively and original; it is a captivating journey from start to finish.
A joy to read.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982102-57-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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