A novel of resonant stories that combine to form a powerful meditation on race.
Kraft’s debut novel explores the nuances of race, color, sex and identity while telling the stories of several women in three close families.
African-American Grace Brown and Polish immigrant Mrs. Elliott live in the same Columbus, Ohio, apartment building. Mrs. Elliott’s own children are grown, but she helps look after Grace’s daughters and son. She’s a good friend to Grace, whose white husband abruptly abandoned her and their children a few years earlier. Grace’s daughters, Becky and Leah, are younger than Mrs. Elliott’s oldest daughter, Margo, but they befriend Keisha, Margo’s 22-year-old adopted daughter. Similarly, Keisha makes friends with Emma and Jennifer Douglas, the mixed-race children of Margo’s friends, and they become her surrogate sisters. The children eventually grow up and start their own lives, but the entire clan reunites to support Keisha when she’s put on trial for the murder of a young white man. Since Keisha has very dark skin, the varied members of her multiracial extended family fear the trial’s outcome. Kraft tells each of the characters’ stories through detailed vignettes set in different times and places, but they all maintain a sense of interconnectedness. The author’s prose is often skillful, although some readers may find that she relies too much on similes; however, her astute, expressive imagery makes up for this flaw (“her wild mane of hair fluffs around her head, an effect softened only by a wide multi-colored headband, so that she seems a cross between a washerwoman and an African queen”). Although the book addresses issues such as motherhood, sexuality and self-awareness, its primary focus is skin color and what its spectrum means to those who fall within its many nonwhite shades. Some readers may feel that the many specific descriptions of characters’ skin colors seem repetitious; however, by using this device, Kraft refuses to allow readers to forget, even for a moment, about the impact of color in today’s society. Overall, she has produced a novel that’s certain to inspire and inform much-needed discourse.
A novel of resonant stories that combine to form a powerful meditation on race.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0741499905
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Infinity Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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