A preachy environmental message dominates this tale of the 18th century.
As a Native American slave returns home, the Spaniards who accompany her learn to better appreciate nature in this historical novel.
In the late 1700s, 14-year-old Watili enjoys a peaceful life with her family in the village of the Parussi band of the Ute tribe (in present-day Colorado). They enjoy what author Garcia (Shared Lives, Twin Sun, 2016, etc.) describes as their “Oneness with Nature.” However, their tranquility is shattered when a band of Apache Indians raids their village in search of people to enslave. Watili and her brother are captured and forced to march more than 700 miles. Upon reaching El Paso, they’re sold into servitude, and Watili begins work as a slave maid for a Spanish family. She dreams of returning to her own loved ones back home, and the opportunity to do so arises when she meets Don Bernardo, a famous Spanish explorer and cartographer. The two agree to work together: Watili will show Bernardo lucrative sources of gold and silver ore near her village if he takes her there and grants her freedom. The two embark on their journey, soon to be joined by a charming cibolero (Spanish buffalo hunter), and the trio find plenty of adventure along the way. This book is valuable in how it details the slave trade among Native American peoples—a topic that will be unfamiliar to many readers. However, because Garcia offers no notes on the novel’s historicity, the reader has little to no sense of what’s fact or fiction. The book’s biggest weakness, though, is its lack of subtlety in its spiritual message. The author is so adamant about advocating “Nature” that his characters to seem more like mouthpieces than real people. For example, here’s the final exchange of the two Spaniards: “ ‘What we have seen was the experience of two Europeans…two outsiders who were given a rare glimpse into the Oneness of God and Nature.’ ‘I am moved by this experience….’ ‘My knowledge of the spiritual realm has awoken.’ ” A subtler approach would have been more likely to engage readers.
A preachy environmental message dominates this tale of the 18th century.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9903739-3-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Jornado de Exodo-Journey of Exodus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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