An engrossing novel that truly is a praise song for survivors everywhere.
A child's shocking experience of ritual servitude.
Young Abeo lives in an affluent, urban neighborhood in the fictional African nation of Ukemby. With a spacious home, loving parents, and a baby brother she adores, Abeo is leading a happy and secure childhood. She even has an enchanting Aunt Serafine, who visits from the U.S. and introduces her to worldly delights like Big Mac sandwiches. Before her tearful farewell to Serafine, Abeo takes a ring from her aunt’s collection of bangles and beads, hoping that together with her earnest prayers, the ring will draw Serafine back to Ukemby. It is a childish plan, but Abeo is soon convinced that her secret misdeed is the cause of the horrific shift in her life. The reader knows better, as do the adults around her who instigate, ignore, or are impotent to help when a trusted adult delivers Abeo to a fetish priest at a distant village shrine to become a trokosi, a female slave. It’s an astonishing and desperate act, meant to appease the gods, following old traditions, after Abeo's father is accused of wrongdoing. But there is nothing holy at the shrine. The obscenities inflicted upon Abeo and the other young girls held captive are profound and inhumane. Back-breaking work, a near-starvation diet, beatings, and rapes—it's hard to keep reading as Abeo experiences loss after loss, but it would be a mistake to put the book down. Though Abeo’s childhood, body, and, finally, her spirit are destroyed, McFadden’s often riveting prose keeps the reader turning pages. Several plot twists, such as the revelation of Abeo's parentage, seem wedged in, but in the end, the promise of seeing Abeo survive the tragic theft of her childhood makes up for the lack of a more nuanced plot.
An engrossing novel that truly is a praise song for survivors everywhere.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61775-575-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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