A heartfelt tale of motherhood and Mother Earth.
A family is torn apart by the machinations of an evil spirit in Wolfe’s novel that draws on mythology of Indigenous peoples of South America.
Nine-year-old Rani catches a fish in the river that dies suddenly and mysteriously as he pulls it from the water. His father, the tribal chief Karòn, touches the fish and gets a strange blister. Later that night, the chief bursts into the hut where his wife and sons are sleeping and kills two of the boys in a furious, unprovoked attack. After the funeral, their mother, Entza sends the three surviving brothers, including Rani, away from the village to ensure that they’re safe from their father: “You will live in the forest, away from men, until somehow, I give you a signal that you may return,” she tells Rani. “You will not enter this or any other village unless you are bid by me alone, no matter how much time passes.” Along with his older brother, Gryph, and baby brother, Marev, Rani flees into the jungle. In the forest, Pachamama—also known as Mother Earth—watches over the boys and wishes to protect them as much as Entza does. The group survives by relying on Rani’s peculiar talent for communing with nature. Back in the village, Entza tries to bring Karòn to justice and contend with the evil spirit, Kenaima, that may have influenced him. Wolfe’s prose, framed as narration by the Pachamama herself, is well calibrated to this primordial tale: “[Karòn] walked in his lifeless way past huts and along the paths toward the village center, intent on reaching his home. His sleeping wife his target. I longed to cry out, give warning to Entza that he was coming for her.” Despite the magical atmosphere, the book takes its characters and their relationships seriously, and the complex familial relationships give the story an intense emotional resonance. Likewise, Wolfe skillfully makes the natural world a dynamic, ever present factor in the story—educating, endangering, and sustaining Rani at every turn. There are sections where the narrative momentum seems to stall, but the overall reading experience is thrilling and rewarding.
A heartfelt tale of motherhood and Mother Earth.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5320-8468-3
Page Count: 188
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2020
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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