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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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