A splendidly conceived saga weaving the history of an entire culture into the portrait of one family: vivid, compelling,...
A kaleidoscopic debut by Anglo-Indian Le Hunte about several generations of an Indian family through the 20th century and across several continents.
Aakash was the son of a well-to-do family in a small village near the Himalayas who at an early age became known for his powers of healing; when he cured the hemophiliac son of a local maharaja, he was rewarded with a gift of land, which he turned into an “ayurvedic farm.” Although the farm prospered greatly and Aakash had two healthy children by his wife Jyoti Ma, he could never settle down to enjoy the life of a patriarch, and he eventually left his family to live in a distant ashram. His son Ram also grew up to be a wandering holy man, while his daughter Tulsi Devi was sent to a convent school where she was seduced by her math teacher and gave birth to a son (Jivan) out of wedlock. She later married a retired British Army officer and had a daughter (Rohini) by him. The sickly Jivan, who contracted polio as a small boy, was sent to a foster home to be raised by strangers, and Rohini grew up entirely ignorant of her half-brother. Years later, she would marry an Englishman and move to London, where she trained as a midwife, gave birth to a daughter (Saakshi), and became connected with the Spiritualist Church in Belgravia, where she attended regular séances to contact the spirit of her grandfather Aakash. The medium in charge of these séances stunned Rohini one day by confiding to her that her daughter Saakshi was going to give birth to an avatar, a reincarnation of Aakash’s spirit. Rohini has put much of her Indian traditions behind her. Can she really believe that her grandchild will, in fact, be her grandfather? Just think of the old Hindu totem of the serpent eating his own tail.
A splendidly conceived saga weaving the history of an entire culture into the portrait of one family: vivid, compelling, utterly fascinating.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-052197-X
Page Count: 416
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.
Edgy humor and fierce imagery coexist in these stories with shrewd characterization and humane intelligence, inspired by volatile material sliced off the front pages.
The state of race relations in post-millennial America haunts most of the stories in this debut collection. Yet Adjei-Brenyah brings to what pundits label our “ongoing racial dialogue” a deadpan style, an acerbic perspective, and a wicked imagination that collectively upend readers’ expectations. “The Finkelstein 5,” the opener, deals with the furor surrounding the murder trial of a white man claiming self-defense in slaughtering five black children with a chainsaw. The story is as prickly in its view toward black citizens seeking their own justice as it is pitiless toward white bigots pressing for an acquittal. An even more caustic companion story, “Zimmer Land,” is told from the perspective of an African-American employee of a mythical theme park whose white patrons are encouraged to act out their fantasies of dispensing brutal justice to people of color they regard as threatening on sight, or “problem solving," as its mission statement calls it. Such dystopian motifs recur throughout the collection: “The Era,” for example, identifies oppressive class divisions in a post-apocalyptic school district where self-esteem seems obtainable only through regular injections of a controlled substance called “Good.” The title story, meanwhile, riotously reimagines holiday shopping as the blood-spattered zombie movie you sometimes fear it could be in real life. As alternately gaudy and bleak as such visions are, there’s more in Adjei-Brenyah’s quiver besides tough-minded satire, as exhibited in “The Lion & the Spider,” a tender coming-of-age story cleverly framed in the context of an African fable.
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-91124-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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