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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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