Blackness, feminism and the loss of virginity have never been analyzed by a more astute and witty main character.
In this witty take on 1980s Philadelphia, a young girl comes of age and learns to navigate love, loss, school and family.
Kenya, whom we meet at age 7 and watch graduate from high school into womanhood, is the daughter of Afrocentric parents. Their politics and yearly celebration of Kwanzaa, which entails “sporting an orange, yellow and brown dashiki and a forehead-straining vertical braided hairstyle,” make Kenya a social pariah even at her all-black school. In Kenya, Solomon has crafted a character of irrepressible verve and voice who carries us joyously through the novel—even after she witnesses her parents’ breakup, when her father is imprisoned for injuring her mother with a gun. With the separation, Kenya is propelled from her safe black Philly world into the white world of an elite private school—the very world her father fled, traumatized and bitter. Here, she becomes a master of code-switching to fit in, all while knowing that her classmates will never truly accept her. After a chance meeting with a black boy from her old neighborhood turns into a failed love affair, Kenya seeks comfort in a visit to her father, newly released from prison. The scenes with Kenya’s father, who's enjoying a bigamous life with two new wives and two new sets of kids, are razor-sharp on the contradictions of identity—here, for example, we see Kenya’s father, a staunch activist for African-American rights, unable to make the link to respect women’s rights. Kenya has a palpable need for her father to become a solid, guiding force as she steps into womanhood, but he can’t do it. And when her stepfather loses all her mother’s money, Kenya’s future college education doesn't quite go as planned. In this debut novel, Solomon (Get Down, 2008) examines the confusing moments on the verge of adulthood within the ever shifting makeup of family and society.
Blackness, feminism and the loss of virginity have never been analyzed by a more astute and witty main character.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-14034-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
With only a sliver less suspense, Koontz follows up 1996's Intensity with an afterlife novel about a plane crash. Los Angeles crime reporter Joe Carpenter (ah, those initials) needs resurrecting. One year ago his wife, Michelle, and two daughters, Chrissie and little Nina, actually did die in a devastating plane crash over Colorado: no survivors. In a dive, the plane had rocketed straight into millennial rock, leaving only two pieces larger than a car door. Joe, locked in unbearable grief, has quit work, sold his house, moved to a studio apartment over a garage, and is gnawing himself to death with weight loss. Meetings with a compassionate survivor group haven't helped. Rage and anger with an unjust God in whom Joe doesn't believe takes up all his energy. Then visiting his wife and children's graves, Joe finds Dr. Rose Tucker, a black Asian woman with great presence who's taking Polaroids of his family's burial sites. She tells him she survived the crash! But suddenly two men appear and start shooting at her as she races off. Joe soon finds himself involved in unraveling a suicide plague that has struck relatives of the plane's dead. Rose has taken Polaroids of the graves of other relatives as well—but whoever gets one of her pictures first sees a blissful image of the afterlife, then commits suicide, often horribly. As Joe tracks Rose down, he hears that a little girl survived with her, a girl named Nina. Has mankind reached a turning point, as Dr. Tucker avers, at which science has now proven the existence of the afterlife? Funded by a multibillionaire, a secret but massive scientific effort larger than the Manhattan Project has made fantastic strides in the paranormal and revealed a breakthrough into . . . but some baddies want to use this discovery for their own ends, and thus Joe and Rose—and Nina!—must be killed. Masterfully styled, serious entertainment. These are Koontz's great years. (First printing 600,000; Literary Guild main selection; author tour; radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 13, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-42526-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fable about the consolatory and strengthening powers of religion flounders about somewhere inside this unconventional coming-of-age tale, which was shortlisted for Canada’s Governor General’s Award. The story is told in retrospect by Piscine Molitor Patel (named for a swimming pool, thereafter fortuitously nicknamed “Pi”), years after he was shipwrecked when his parents, who owned a zoo in India, were attempting to emigrate, with their menagerie, to Canada. During 227 days at sea spent in a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger (mostly with the latter, which had efficiently slaughtered its fellow beasts), Pi found serenity and courage in his faith: a frequently reiterated amalgam of Muslim, Hindu, and Christian beliefs. The story of his later life, education, and mission rounds out, but does not improve upon, the alternately suspenseful and whimsical account of Pi’s ordeal at sea—which offers the best reason for reading this otherwise preachy and somewhat redundant story of his Life.
Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100811-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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