That Grooms’ incisive, gripping, and empathetic novel dares to probe beneath the humiliations, customs, and fears that...
A real-life racially motivated mass killing from 1946 is boldly and deeply reimagined—as are its long-term reverberations.
It is the summer of 1946, and 10-year-old Lonnie Henson, a young white boy living in the rural outskirts of Bethany, Georgia, is picking blackberries toward twilight when he stumbles upon a horrific sight: a crowd of white men and women, some of whom he recognizes, gathered together to shoot and bludgeon two African-American couples to death; one of the dead he recognizes as Bertrand Johnson, a family friend who’d found communion with Lonnie’s late father, an ex-GI traumatized by what he’d witnessed during World War II. From that jolting opening, Grooms (Trouble No More, 1996, etc.) gradually weaves his narrative back and forth to the days, months, and years preceding and following the murders, which are drawn from a real-life lynching of two couples that same year in the same region. (No one was ever arrested or prosecuted.) With dexterity and compassion, Grooms takes the full measure of his characters, white and black, including Lonnie’s parents and great aunt Grace; Bertrand’s outspoken wife, Luellen, and stoic mother, Milledge; Maribelle Crookshank, owner of the local diner and town gossip; Vernon Venable, the wealthy white businessman who sets the ugly events in motion by attacking the wife of Jimmy Lee, one of the four victims; and Venable’s friend Noland Jacks, who is one of those Lonnie remembers most in the lynch mob even after he’s grown up and left to join the Navy, forever agonized and conscience-stricken by what he’s seen. Grooms’ novel presents racism as a self-perpetuating monster piling large and small atrocities atop one another. No one is immune from those atrocities or their consequences, the book strongly asserts—though it also implies that redemption, at whatever cost, may be accessible to those who, like Lonnie, feel deeply enough to escape their grim legacy.
That Grooms’ incisive, gripping, and empathetic novel dares to probe beneath the humiliations, customs, and fears that sustain injustice implies that our seemingly eternal conversation on race, to which the title refers, may not be as vain as it often seems.Pub Date: March 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61117-882-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
At the outset, this might seem like minor Morrison (A Mercy, 2008, etc.), not only because its length is borderline novella,...
A deceptively rich and cumulatively powerful novel.
At the outset, this might seem like minor Morrison (A Mercy, 2008, etc.), not only because its length is borderline novella, but because the setup seems generic. A black soldier returns from the Korean War, where he faces a rocky re-entry, succumbing to alcoholism and suffering from what would subsequently be termed PTSD. Yet perhaps, as someone tells him, his major problem is the culture to which he returns: “An integrated army is integrated misery. You all go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better.” Ultimately, the latest from the Nobel Prize–winning novelist has something more subtle and shattering to offer than such social polemics. As the novel progresses, it becomes less specifically about the troubled soldier and as much about the sister he left behind in Georgia, who was married and deserted young, and who has fallen into the employ of a doctor whose mysterious experiments threaten her life. And, even more crucially, it’s about the relationship between the brother and his younger sister, which changes significantly after his return home, as both of them undergo significant transformations. “She was a shadow for most of my life, a presence marking its own absence, or maybe mine,” thinks the soldier. He discovers that “while his devotion shielded her, it did not strengthen her.” As his sister is becoming a woman who can stand on her own, her brother ultimately comes to terms with dark truths and deep pain that he had attempted to numb with alcohol. Before they achieve an epiphany that is mutually redemptive, even the earlier reference to “dogs” reveals itself as more than gratuitous.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-59416-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
This is historical adventure on a grand scale, right up there with the works of Conn Iggulden and Minette Walters.
Plenty of gore from days of yore fills the 12th entry in Cornwell’s The Last Kingdom series (War of the Wolf, 2018, etc.).
The pagan warlord Uhtred of Bebbanburg narrates his 10th-century adventures, during which he hacks people apart so that kingdoms might be stitched together. He is known to some as the Godless or the Wicked, a reputation he enjoys. Edward, King of Wessex, Mercia, and East Anglia is gravely ill, and Uhtred pledges an oath to likely heir Æthelstan to kill two rivals, Æthelhelm and “his rotten nephew,” Ælfweard, when the king dies. Uhtred’s wife, Eadith, wants him to break that oath, but he cannot live with the dishonor of being an oathbreaker. The tale seems to begin in the middle, as though the reader had just turned the last page in the 11th book—and yet it stands alone quite well. Uhtred travels the coast and the river Temes in the good ship Spearhafoc, powered by 40 rowers struggling against tides and currents. He and his men fight furious battles, and he lustily impales foes with his favorite sword, Serpent-Breath. “I don’t kill the helpless,” though, which is one of his few limits. So, early in the story, when a man calling himself “God’s chosen one” declares “We were sent to kill you,” readers may chuckle and say yeah, right. But Uhtred faces true challenges such as Waormund, “lord Æthelhelm’s beast.” Immense bloodletting aside, Cornwell paints vivid images of the filth in the Temes and in cities like Lundene. This is mainly manly fare, of course. Few women are active characters. The queen needs rescuing, and “when queens call for help, warriors go to war.” The action is believable if often gruesome and loathsome, and it never lets up for long.
This is historical adventure on a grand scale, right up there with the works of Conn Iggulden and Minette Walters.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-256321-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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