A meandering volume of poetry and prose that focuses on a teenager from Ghana and school issues.
A short novel and a collection of poems deal with the subjects of peer pressure and bullying.
Selom, a 16-year-old from Ghana, comes to New York to attend high school. Her public school is diverse—“Caribbean, Africans, Black Americans, Indians”—and yet the culture shock requires some adjustments. Even more difficult to navigate are the social hazards of being a teenager: getting called ugly in the cafeteria, getting asked out by a boy via his friend. Her home life is crowded—she and her sisters are forced to share a bed in her uncle’s house. At school, she faces a constant barrage of boys telling her how much they like her. She attempts to hunker down and focus on her work while also pursuing creative writing on the side, but the constant male attention at school threatens the American education that Selom and her family have worked so hard, and sacrificed so much, to attain. The text concludes with a collection of 17 poems, most of which deal with themes of teenage alienation and loneliness, such as “Sometimes”: “Sometimes, / I walk alone, / And think alone, / But no one knows, / I am alone.” Dzissah (A World of Beautiful Colors, 2015, etc.) admits in her introduction that this book is a revised version of an earlier volume, The Westerners (2005), and there is a hodgepodge quality to this work that is more confusing than it is cohesive. The novel shifts tense several times over the course of the narrative, and the characters feel less like people than names that come in and out of Selom’s classrooms. The poems are thematically linked to the novel (more or less), but they don’t come together to make a satisfying whole. An interstitial chapter about bullying reads like an attempt to use these disparate works to make a larger point, and while the attention paid to the subject is worthwhile, the book remains mostly amorphous and ultimately insubstantial.
A meandering volume of poetry and prose that focuses on a teenager from Ghana and school issues.Pub Date: June 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5035-6910-2
Page Count: 134
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
