A well-crafted collection of vignettes, neatly stitched together.
Kaleidoscopic portrait of a Southern California town whose nexus is an indomitable botánica owner.
For about three decades, Perla has been running Botánica Oshún, which sells charms, votive candles, books and a host of Mexican folk remedies. At 72, she has no family to speak of—her husband is dead, and they had no children—but she has plenty of interactions with the people who (often tentatively) step through the door of her shop in a strip mall about 50 miles outside of Los Angeles. Tracing a year in the life of Botánica Oshún, Espinoza’s debut shuttles between empathetic but unromanticized glimpses of Perla and snapshots of people who live in the neighborhood. At first her customers’ concerns are relatively modest: Rosa badly wants to lose weight; Juan tries to come to terms with his mother, who seems to be mourning Elvis Presley’s death more intensely than her own husband’s. But the novel’s tone and subject matter soon darken and intensify. A young woman attempts to expose her father’s infidelities to her self-deluding mother. Two friends drift deeper into meth addiction after one hooks up with a bad-news girlfriend. And a 15-year-old male prostitute who’s beaten and abused by his lover slips out of Perla’s reach. Title notwithstanding, the novel doesn’t try to sweeten, let alone sanctify, the troubled people it depicts. Perla is no saint, either; she’s even skeptical about the usefulness of what she sells. Espinoza occasionally overworks the end of a chapter to engineer a big finish, but he demonstrates a deep understanding of his characters. Setting their lives against Perla’s provides an inventive way to reflect the community’s diversity as well as its shared needs.
A well-crafted collection of vignettes, neatly stitched together.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2007
ISBN: 1-4000-6539-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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