Though the end dips into the maudlin, first-novelist bandele delivers an eloquent message about the tragedy of dreams—and...
A potent mix of familial strife and racial injustice in Brooklyn, by Essence editor, poet, and memoirist bandele (The Prisoner’s Wife, 1999).
Aya’s story begins things: how the 19-year-old is reshaping her life after a year in juvenile detention (a heavy penalty in a case where she was arguably the victim.) The beautiful girl is a straight-A student in college and keeps an early curfew to appease her mother Miriam, a tight-lipped woman who has showered Aya with rules instead of love. When Aya is shot by a white policeman on her evening jog—her hooded sweatshirt similar to a robbery suspect’s—Miriam is left at her daughter’s bedside wondering whether she was all the mother she could have been. Miriam’s own mother, suffering five miscarriages before the birth of her daughter, considered Miriam a miracle and protected her like a relic: Miriam’s life was a warning of what not to do, who not to talk to, how not to think. When Miriam is 16, she meets Bird, a janitor at her high school, newly back from Vietnam. With Bird, Miriam begins to think and feel for herself, and the two begin a secret and chaste love affair. When Miriam’s parents discover the relationship, she must move in with Bird and the loving grandmother he supports. The two build dreams for the future—despite Bird’s Vietnam nightmares and the police harassment he endures, simply for being black in America. bandele’s agenda, via Bird—the inequities of the black soldier, the long history of racial profiling, living with injustice and the effects of that on Miriam and those around her—finds a balanced voice in the short and angry life of Bird Jefferson. While Miriam is pregnant with Aya, Bird is “accidentally” shot by the police, and Miriam switches to emotional autopilot for the next 19 years, until the shooting of her own daughter.
Though the end dips into the maudlin, first-novelist bandele delivers an eloquent message about the tragedy of dreams—and life—deferred.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-1184-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A super-exorcism that leaves the taste of somebody else's blood in your mouth and what a bad taste it is. King presents us with the riddle of a small Maine town that has been deserted overnight. Where did all the down-Easters go? Matter of fact, they're still there but they only get up at sundown. . . for a warm drink. . . .Ben Mears, a novelist, returns to Salem's Lot (pop. 1319), the hometown he hasn't seen since he was four years old, where he falls for a young painter who admires his books (what happens to her shouldn't happen to a Martian). Odd things are manifested. Someone rents the ghastly old Marsten mansion, closed since a horrible double murder-suicide in 1939; a dog is found impaled on a spiked fence; a healthy boy dies of anemia in one week and his brother vanishes. Ben displays tremendous calm considering that you're left to face a corpse that sits up after an autopsy and sinks its fangs into the coroner's neck. . . . Vampirism, necrophilia, et dreadful alia rather overplayed by the author of Carrie (1974).
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1975
ISBN: 0385007515
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1975
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This novel began as a reworking of W.W. Jacobs' horror classic "The Monkey's Paw"—a short story about the dreadful outcome when a father wishes for his dead son's resurrection. And King's 400-page version reads, in fact, like a monstrously padded short story, moving so slowly that every plot-turn becomes lumberingly predictable. Still, readers with a taste for the morbid and ghoulish will find unlimited dark, mortality-obsessed atmosphere here—as Dr. Louis Creed arrives in Maine with wife Rachel and their two little kids Ellie and Gage, moving into a semi-rural house not far from the "Pet Sematary": a spot in the woods where local kids have been burying their pets for decades. Louis, 35, finds a great new friend/father-figure in elderly neighbor Jud Crandall; he begins work as director of the local university health-services. But Louis is oppressed by thoughts of death—especially after a dying student whispers something about the pet cemetery, then reappears in a dream (but is it a dream) to lead Louis into those woods during the middle of the night. What is the secret of the Pet Sematary? Well, eventually old Jud gives Louis a lecture/tour of the Pet Sematary's "annex"—an old Micmac burying ground where pets have been buried. . .and then reappeared alive! So, when little Ellie's beloved cat Church is run over (while Ellie's visiting grandfolks), Louis and Jud bury it in the annex—resulting in a faintly nasty resurrection: Church reappears, now with a foul smell and a creepy demeanor. But: what would happen if a human corpse were buried there? That's the question when Louis' little son Gage is promptly killed in an accident. Will grieving father Louis dig up his son's body from the normal graveyard and replant it in the Pet Sematary? What about the stories of a previous similar attempt—when dead Timmy Baterman was "transformed into some sort of all-knowing daemon?" Will Gage return to the living—but as "a thing of evil?" He will indeed, spouting obscenities and committing murder. . .before Louis must eliminate this child-demon he has unleashed. Filled out with overdone family melodrama (the feud between Louis and his father-in-law) and repetitious inner monologues: a broody horror tale that's strong on dark, depressing chills, weak on suspense or surprise—and not likely to please the fans of King's zestier, livelier terror-thons.
Pub Date: Nov. 4, 1983
ISBN: 0743412281
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1983
BOOK TO SCREEN
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