Assured and engrossing tale of survival and forgiveness.
A displaced African-American woman and her estranged mother rediscover their heritage and each other en route to a family reunion in rural Georgia.
With a fine new man and baby on the way, free spirit Sherry feels her life is finally on track, but she also realizes she cannot move forward without facing certain events from her past, including an inexplicable moment of violence in her childhood that distanced her from her mother Clementine “Dumpling” Jackson. With reconciliation and resolution on her mind, Sherry convinces her mother to drive with her to their ancestral home of Sandersville, Ga., to attend a family reunion. Along the way, Sherry questions her mother about their shared ancestry in the hopes of writing a family history. The story then shifts to Sherry's imagined version of that history, beginning with her Yamasee Indian great-grandmother Lou, who was abducted in childhood and sold into slavery. The resilient Lou has three children with fellow slave Buena Vista, all the while facing one harrowing experience after another. After the Civil War, and unaware that slavery has ended, Lou’s children Jeff and Suce take over their cotton plantation from their weakened master and participate in several brutal (and perhaps justifiable) acts that foreshadow much of the family’s tragedy for generations to come. Dealing with murder, rape and incest, this often grim tale is lightened considerably by a no-nonsense running commentary from the lovably flawed Dumpling, who thinks the past should be let go. Well paced, with excellent dialogue, Sherry’s story-within-a-story is sometimes hampered by southern gothic clichés.
Assured and engrossing tale of survival and forgiveness.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-525-94875-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
After she sets up a world in which racism thoroughly defines every aspect of character and plot, Picoult's conclusion occurs...
In Picoult’s (Leaving Time, 2014, etc.) latest novel, Ruth Jefferson, a labor and delivery nurse, struggles to survive claims of murdering a patient while keeping her own family intact.
Picoult has made a name for herself crafting novels of depth and insight, peopled with rich characters and relationships. Here, she explores the intersection of racial bias, medicine, and the law. African-American Ruth Jefferson has been a labor and delivery nurse for more than 20 years, and she's the kind of professional every patient dreams of: she genuinely cares for her patients and takes joy in seeking out ways she can help them—whether it be a back rub or an epidural. But Ruth is completely thrown when a newborn baby’s parents, both white supremacists, demand that she be removed from their care team because they don't want a black person touching their child. In a moment of deliberate plot maneuvering, Ruth is left as the sole nurse on the child’s floor, and the baby goes into cardiac arrest and dies. Ruth, accused of hesitating before performing CPR, is charged with murder. There's no question that Picoult is a talented writer. The plot is suspenseful, the structure and pacing exquisite. But there is also no question that writing a story from the perspective of a black woman requires more racial consciousness than she displays here. At times the plot feels more like an intellectual exercise to understand racism than an organic exploration of a real person's life. The voice is that of a nonblack person discovering all at once that racism exists rather than that of a black person who has lived with racism her whole life. Picoult has drawn upon every black stereotype available: here is the black single mother, the angry black woman, the mammy, the maid, the teenage "thug," the exceptional token, and the grandstanding preacher. Alternating among the points of view of Ruth; the white supremacist father, Turk Bauer; and Ruth’s lawyer, Kennedy McQuarrie, Picoult is at her best when she lets the novel solidify into Kennedy’s narrative, the tale of a white woman who thinks she's more liberal than she actually is. It's Kennedy's journey of coming to terms with her own racist relatives and white privilege, as she realizes, for the first time, the pervasiveness of American racism, that is the real story here—and the novel would have been stronger if it had been written from this perspective throughout.
After she sets up a world in which racism thoroughly defines every aspect of character and plot, Picoult's conclusion occurs in a separate fairy-tale world where racism suddenly does not exist, resulting in a rather juvenile portrayal of racial politics in America.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-54495-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
A late autumn retrospective, accomplished with a long lens, in which Lyman Ward, retired, ill and wheelchair-bound, attempts to affirm the continuity of the past and the "Doppler effect" of time by reconstructing his grandparents' lives. This in partial contrast to and rebuttal of his son at Berkeley "interested in change but only as a process. . . in values, but only as data" (the schism of his last book, All the Little Live Things). Much as one respects the amplitude of this novel and its sincerity, it all goes on and on (except for occasional present day interruptions) and one is never really very interested in Susan Burling Ward and her deracination from the cultured East to the uncivilized West in the 1870's by her husband, an engineer. It was always for her an "exile" and except for the terminal incidents ( a muted love affair which resulted in the accidental death of a child, her lover's suicide and permanent separation from her husband) there is almost no narrative incentive. The repose, however pleasant, becomes a kind of narcosis.
Pub Date: March 19, 1971
ISBN: 0141185473
Page Count: 486
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1971
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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