An engaging, disturbing tale of love, loss, and human frailties set against cross-cultural conflicts.
In this novel, a young American woman joins the Foreign Service and is sent to Cambodia during Southeast Asia’s turbulent 1960s.
Julia Galbraith, nearly 23, arrives in Phnom Penh in the Mango Rain season (pre-monsoon period) of 1963. It is her first overseas posting. Prince Sihanouk is still in power, playing a delicate balancing act between friendships with America and China, which are involved in the early stages of their battle in war-torn Vietnam. In Cambodia, the Khmer Serei, an anti-Sihanouk rebel group hiding in Thailand, is becoming more threatening. The political machinations in Southeast Asia during this time create an intriguing and increasingly dark backdrop. During Julia’s tenure, a military coup ousts the United States–supported Diem government in Vietnam; President John F. Kennedy is assassinated; and the American position in Cambodia becomes tenuous. But the real drama in the novel rests with the romantic liaisons, ambitions, tragedies, and disappointments of various members of the diplomatic corps and the journalists covering them, beginning with Julia, through whom readers meet the rest of the characters. Her ill-fated love affair with the handsome Charles Hourani, who is attached to the Moroccan Embassy, is just one of the narrative’s challenging relationships that change lives and often end sadly as the story eventually progresses through succeeding decades. Oman, who has some experience in the Foreign Service, offers a captivating insider glimpse of America’s diplomatic mission during a tumultuous time. Vivid images of Cambodia—the colors, aromas, flavors, and street scenes—bring readers directly into the time and place: “Fortunetellers squat on the pavement, and old men hold cages of songbirds. Dentists set up rudimentary shops on the sidewalks, their primitive tools laid out on less-than-pristine towels.” The second half of the richly descriptive and poignant book—with the exception of its first chapter, which concludes Julia’s time in Southeast Asia—consists of an assortment of catch-up vignettes that fill in the ultimate fates of most of the supporting characters. It makes for a rather melancholy finale.
An engaging, disturbing tale of love, loss, and human frailties set against cross-cultural conflicts.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73323-322-4
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Galaxy Galloper Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy (The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend—the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1986
ISBN: 0553381547
Page Count: 686
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
SEEN & HEARD
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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