A debut novel that could be a moveable feast of blackness and love as it moves across cultural and geographic boundaries is undercut by New Age clichÇs, Afrocentric politics, and an insufferably smug hero. Busia, the Ghanaian-born writer who also appeared as Nettie in The Color Purple, vividly evokes settings as varied as the Caribbean, New York, her native Ghana, and London in telling the story of Solomon Eustace Wilberforce. Under the pseudonym of Beento Blackbird, Solomon is the successful writer of children's stories with uplifting African-American themes. As a leader in the Power Program he helped found, he frequently speaks on empowerment at high schools and prisons; is a major investor in black-owned enterprises on his native Caribbean island; and also generously supports orphans and indigent relatives, activities that make Solomon seem admirable, though at the same time he has arranged his love life in ways satisfactory to himself but not always to others. The illegitimate son of an islander and an American vacationer married to a white woman, he spent his adolescence in the US, becoming a writer but never forgetting his roots. He now spends winter in the Caribbean with his wife Miriam, an older woman who had also been the young midwife who delivered him; in spring, with his ``inner child eager to show him how to lead the children into a bright new world,'' he moves to New York, where he writes; and in summer he flies to Ghana to be with young Ashia, wife number two. Solomon's masculine idyll ends when Ashia has a son, then arrives in the Caribbean and meets Miriam. Forced to choose between them, Solomon flees, only to emerge after a period of solitude and Bible study with an Afrocentric reading of Christianity and the convictions that love is all and Miriam is the only wife for him. Well and good, but, still, what's really here is more upmarket fantasy than convincing fiction.
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 1996
ISBN: 0-316-11495-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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