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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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