In a knife-edged, poignant debut, Brooklyn-based Verdelle cuts to the heart and innermost thoughts of a black girl—a girl coming of age in 1960's Detroit—who struggles against racial limits and family entrapments to develop a mind yearning for fulfillment. When Denise's mother, Margarete, freshly widowed, leaves Denise with her grandmother in rural Virginia, the little girl is heartbroken. But she adapts quickly to country ways so that when she's summoned home to Detroit several years later to help her now- pregnant mother, her near-grown older brothers, and their new stepfather, she hates to go. A short, though warm, homecoming ushers in fresh realities: Denise's superior cooking and cleaning skills clinch for her the position of family housekeeper, while her down-home speech greatly impedes her progress at school. Taken under the wing of a new and exacting teacher, Miss Gloria Pearson, Denise begins to shine as a student and to dream of a better life; but in the face of mounting chores on the arrival of Margarete's baby, along with a tense situation at home as stepfather-son relations deteriorate, Denise has to make a Hobson's choice between future and family. She finds the will to juggle her responsibilities—a triumph of determination and dignity, but one with a terrible cost as she is unable to keep her favorite, ne'er- do-well brother, Luke Edward, from harm's way. Concerned after having watched him humiliated by their grandmother for shoplifting, and later driven from home for his attitude, Denise tries to protect him when his next theft is discovered, but her warning falls on deaf ears. Both the vitality and perils of life in divided families—as well as the larger conflict between a woman's duty and desire- -receive deft, honest handling here, revealing a vibrant new voice in our midst. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56512-085-X
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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