A quiet, skillful novel about keeping Inuit traditions and family harmony.
A novel about an unusual summer in a changing world.
Hopwood (Gladys & Jack, 2012, etc.) sets her novel in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada, on Frobisher Bay. Rosa Mama is an old Inuit woman who’s seen her town change remarkably over her lifetime. (By the story’s end, she’s even outlived two husbands.) But she’s never before seen a summer when the ice in the bay refused to melt. Iqaluit receives supplies of all kinds from the south, but with an unusually cold summer, boats can’t come in, and planes can barely land. This casts the whole town back to a way of life that’s unfamiliar to most residents, and it prompts the Inuit community to turn to its elders to learn how to survive without modern conveniences. Community leaders organize trips to hunt for caribou, musk-ox, hare, ground squirrels and even seals, which Rosa Mama regards as a blessing in the turmoil of the frozen summer. “I smiled,” she says at a town meeting where hunters assemble. “It reminded me of other years in akunahhee—the season of starvation between winter and summer; but this was new. It was a season of starvation between summer and winter.” As the town contends with its unusual summer, more and more people are willing to listen to Rosa Mama and her peers discuss the way life once was. The joy is cut short, however, when Rosa Mama’s husband, Joe, dies in his kayak on a seal-hunting trip. Their grandson, Adam, witnessed the incident, and it’s up to Rosa Mama to hold her family together long enough to learn the truth about what happened. Hopwood’s novel, written from Rosa Mama’s point of view, effectively captures the outlook of an old woman who knows more than people give her credit for and who cares deeply for those around her. The author also makes a point of including details, such as Inuktitut words, that continuously remind readers of the culture in which the story is set. The book is short, but it contains an extended meditation on traditional culture and progress, as well as a portrait of how families manage tragedy and difficult times. Readers who are interested in the lives of modern Inuit people will be intrigued, but the book will appeal to a much broader niche, as well. The love Rosa Mama has for her family and her home is the story’s central thread, and it’s a fulfilling one.
A quiet, skillful novel about keeping Inuit traditions and family harmony.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499077728
Page Count: 90
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Simmering with tension, this tragic, albeit imperfect, mystery is sure to keep readers inching off their seats.
A forsaken family bound by grief still struggles to pick up the pieces 12 years after their mother’s death.
When famous author Gil Coleman sees “his dead wife standing on the pavement below” from a bookshop window in a small town on the southern coast of England, he follows her, but to no avail, and takes a near-fatal fall off a walkway on the beach. As soon as they hear word of his accident, Gil’s grown daughters, Nan and Flora, drop everything and return to their seaside family home in Spanish Green. Though her father’s health is dire, Flora, Gil’s youngest, can’t help but be consumed by the thought that her mother, Ingrid—who went missing and presumably drowned (though the body was never found) off the coast more than a decade ago—could be alive, wandering the streets of their town. British author Fuller’s second novel (Our Endless Numbered Days, 2015) is nimbly told from two alternating perspectives: Flora’s, as she re-evaluates the loose ends of her mother’s ambiguous disappearance; and Ingrid’s, through a series of candid letters she writes, but never delivers, to Gil in the month leading up to the day she vanishes. The most compelling parts of this novel unfold in Ingrid’s letters, in which she chronicles the dissolution of her 16-year marriage to Gil, beginning when they first meet in 1976: Gil is her alluring professor, they engage in a furtive love affair, and fall into a hasty union precipitated by an unexpected pregnancy; Gil gains literary fame, and Ingrid is left to tackle motherhood alone (including two miscarriages); and it all bitterly culminates in the discovery of an irrevocable betrayal. Unbeknownst to Gil and his daughters, these letters remain hidden, neglected, in troves of books throughout the house, and the truth lies seductively within reach. Fuller’s tale is eloquent, harrowing, and raw, but it’s often muddled by tired, cloying dialogue. And whereas Ingrid shines as a protagonist at large, the supporting characters are lacking in depth.
Simmering with tension, this tragic, albeit imperfect, mystery is sure to keep readers inching off their seats.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-941040-51-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy,...
Britisher Haddon debuts in the adult novel with the bittersweet tale of a 15-year-old autistic who’s also a math genius.
Christopher Boone has had some bad knocks: his mother has died (well, she went to the hospital and never came back), and soon after he found a neighbor’s dog on the front lawn, slain by a garden fork stuck through it. A teacher said that he should write something that he “would like to read himself”—and so he embarks on this book, a murder mystery that will reveal who killed Mrs. Shears’s dog. First off, though, is a night in jail for hitting the policeman who questions him about the dog (the cop made the mistake of grabbing the boy by the arm when he can’t stand to be touched—any more than he can stand the colors yellow or brown, or not knowing what’s going to happen next). Christopher’s father bails him out but forbids his doing any more “detecting” about the dog-murder. When Christopher disobeys (and writes about it in his book), a fight ensues and his father confiscates the book. In time, detective-Christopher finds it, along with certain other clues that reveal a very great deal indeed about his mother’s “death,” his father’s own part in it—and the murder of the dog. Calming himself by doing roots, cubes, prime numbers, and math problems in his head, Christopher runs away, braves a train-ride to London, and finds—his mother. How can this be? Read and see. Neither parent, if truth be told, is the least bit prepossessing or more than a cutout. Christopher, though, with pet rat Toby in his pocket and advanced “maths” in his head, is another matter indeed, and readers will cheer when, way precociously, he takes his A-level maths and does brilliantly.
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy, moving, and likely to be a smash.Pub Date: June 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50945-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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