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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
