South African poet Dangor’s first US publication—an intricate blend of racial and sexual tensions, with a twist of Arabic legend thrown in—is set in the post-apartheid era, though the roots of its drama reach into the dismal South African past. In a bid to free himself of suicidal skeletons lurking in his ancestral closet, Omar Khan, as a young man, reinvented his persona. As the Jewish Oscar Kahn, the light-skinned Muslim found acceptance from the masters of apartheid, and so obtained a blond trophy wife, Anna, and a secure place in white society. But he paid a price for his deception: In time, a bizarre illness overtook him and, after Anna fled their house, turned him into a tree—as in the Arabic tale of a palace gardener suffering that fate for daring to love a princess. Anna’s refuge with her brother Martin sours when his wife catches him molesting his youngest daughter, bringing back to Anna a flood of memories of him doing the same thing to her, so she takes her niece away to live with her. Meanwhile, Oscar’s brother Malik, a severe, pious pillar of the Muslim community, finds his own life taking an unexpected turn. His wife moves out; and he begins a passionate affair with his brother’s therapist, Amina, whose black skin he can’t caress enough. Once he leaves her, his rejuvenated state doesn’t last long: He deliberately puts himself in the way of a robber’s gun. Anima works her charm for the last time by seducing Malik’s son, coming between him and a girl whose light skin and hair, despite the dismantling of apartheid, still make her forbidden fruit of the kind Anna was a generation before. Lives and generations complexly interwoven, and language spiked densely with local dialect: a challenging, often exquisite tale of South Africa in transition.
Pub Date: Feb. 9, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40510-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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