A complex story told with skill and intensity, but also filled with moments when agony and extraordinary beauty somehow...
A striking debut full of pain, longing and confusion, Chee’s saga (winner of the James Michener/Copernicus Society Award, Iowa Writers’ Workshop) looks with exquisite care at the lasting effects of a pedophile’s predation on the members of a boys’ choir in Maine.
Young Aphias Zhe, nicknamed Fee, is a Korean-American already self-conscious when he joins the Pine State Boys Chorus. He is dark while so many of his peers are blond, but his difference amounts to more than that. When the choir director, Big Eric, makes his move on the section leaders during a camping trip, Fee is left feeling as degraded as the others, but he also knows that there’s a sharp difference between the way he responds to boys and the way Big Eric does. Fee’s best friend Peter is his secret love, and Fee organizes a kind of resistance to Big Eric in order to keep Peter as safe as he can. After Big Eric is finally unmasked and imprisoned, however, Peter kills himself, unable to come to terms with what the man did to him. Life goes on, with Fee never forgetting that first love and loss. In time, he becomes an art teacher and swimming coach at a private school in Maine, with a steady, loving partner. But one of his swimmers, Warden, is infatuated with him, to the point of becoming physically ill. Unfortunately, although Fee doesn’t know it, Warden is not just any boy with a crush: He is Big Eric’s son, only an infant when his father went to jail, and never told the truth about his father’s history. When the boy forces the romantic issue with Fee, the shameful past comes roaring into the present, with deadly consequences.
A complex story told with skill and intensity, but also filled with moments when agony and extraordinary beauty somehow coexist.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56649-225-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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