Somewhat muted but eventually affecting debut narrated by its 14-year-old protagonist, a pregnant orphan too stubborn to abort her baby or to follow rules laid down by grownups. Thumbelina Skyler (indeed named for “the little girl in the fairy tale”) is a six-foot misfit whose mother Angelica, dumped by her faithless lover Lester, drives her car into a duck pond one day and promptly drowns. This leaves her daughter in the care of single (foster) mother Mrs. Leffer, and under the wing of fellow orphan Myrna, a street-smart teenager who’s also pregnant and with whom Thumbelina embarks on a series of disreputable adventures, including brief tenures as strippers and varied encounters with undependable older men (such as Myrna’s 30ish “boyfriend” Stan), climaxing with our heroine’s realization that she has probably acquired, along with a baby-to-be, “the queer disease” (Lester, it turns out, had preferred his old army buddy Marcus to Angelica ). The story begins pokily, and its impact is lessened by some overfamiliar dramatizations of teenage angst and paranoia (it takes a long time for the bespectacled, gawky Thumbelina to believe she’s attractive). But there are strong points: memories of good and bad times with beautiful, impulsive Angelica are honest and touching, as is Thumbelina’s obvious repression of facts surrounding her own pregnancy and her mother’s death. And in the last hundred pages, the novel takes off: Thumbelina’s scenes with a doctor who was her former softball coach are dazzling blends of comedy and pathos, and several interviews with childless couples seeking to adopt her baby are almost as good. The best thing here, though, is the narrator’s brisk, sardonic, grimly funny voice (“I am not sure a guy with three kids and his stomach over the top of his jeans can really love a girl who hasn’t even started ninth grade,” etc.). A nice debut that takes its time getting going, but it does win you over.
Pub Date: Feb. 12, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85006-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
A knotty portrait of Ojibwe life with some winningly uncanny touches.
A young gay man reckons with love, tribal lore, and a decades-old murder in this rangy debut novel.
Marion, the main narrator of Staples’ first book, isn’t where he wants to be, and that’s back in his hometown on Minnesota’s Ojibwe reservation. A brief stint in the Twin Cities ended with busted relationships, but his best romantic prospect in the area is deeply closeted former high school classmate Shannon, who has the unglorious job of attending to animal carcasses on a resort island. Still, Staples, an Ojibwe writer, wants to suggest that the best way to move forward is by facing one's past head-on. The notion arrives first via symbolism: As children, Marion and his friends spooked each other by saying a dog died under the merry-go-round at the playground, and now that dog reappears (or seems to) in Marion’s presence. That incident sparks Marion’s investigation into his high school days, in particular the murder of Kayden, a basketball star who became a father shortly before he was killed. Plotwise, the story is a stock hero’s-journey tale, as Marion lets go of his skepticism of Ojibwe spiritualism, discovers the truth about Kayden’s death, and finds a community along with a degree of emotional fulfillment. But credit Staples for complicating the story in some interesting ways, from shifting perspectives from Marion to other townspeople (with a particular emphasis on Native women), a smirking humor that cuts the mordant atmosphere (“What do Indians call a lack of faith?” “Being white”), and a graceful handling of Ojibwe culture. In its later stages, the story seems to keep sprouting tentacles as new characters and revelations emerge, which saps some of its narrative drive, but it returns affectingly to the messy fates of Marion and Shannon.
A knotty portrait of Ojibwe life with some winningly uncanny touches.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64009-284-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
This new Baldwin novel is told by a 19-year-old black girl named Tish in a New York City ghetto about how she fell in love with a young black man, Fonny. He got framed on a rape charge and she got pregnant before they could marry and move into their loft; but Tish and her family Finance a trip to Puerto Rico to track down the rape victim and rescue Fonny, a sculptor with slanted eyes and treasured independence. The book is anomalous for the 1970's with its Raisin in the Sun wholesomeness. It is sometimes saccharine, but it possesses a genuinely sweet and free spirit too. Along with the reflex sprinkles of hate-whitey, there are powerful showdowns between the two black families, and a Frieze of people who — unlike Fonny's father — gave up and "congregated on the garbage heaps of their lives." The style wobbles as Tish mixes street talk with lyricism and polemic and a bogus kind of Young Adult hesitancy. Baldwin slips past the conflict between fighting the garbage heap and settling into a long-gone private chianti-chisel-and-garret idyll, as do Fonny and Tish and the baby. But Baldwin makes the affirmation of the humanity of black people which is all too missing in various kinds of Superfly and sub-fly novels.
Pub Date: May 24, 1974
ISBN: 0307275930
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1974
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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