A thoughtful account of early-20th-century racial tensions weighed down by clumsy moralizing.
In a novel set in 1918, a schoolteacher in Georgia clashes with powerful racial prejudice fomented by the Ku Klux Klan.
Anne Aletha O’Quinn’s beloved uncle, Carter Irving, dies and leaves her his farmhouse in Ray’s Mill, Georgia, to start her own school. She’s a cerebral woman with a “solitary nature” and tends to find solace in books rather than people. When she arrives, she’s astonished by the malicious bigotry she sees as well as by the powerfully influential presence of the Ku Klux Klan, welcomed by many for their defense of traditional Southern values since the stormy days of Reconstruction. Even the local religious leaders—Anne Aletha chafes at their hypocrisy and has “stomached enough sermons on sin and perdition to last a lifetime”—hail the Klan members as heroes. Racial tensions run particularly high in Ray’s Mill after a black man is accused of murdering a white man and two black farmhands are lynched by an angry mob. Anne Aletha quickly distinguishes herself as a progressive dissenter: She not only disdains racial bias, but also advocates for the education of black children and plans to provide deeded land to Alex and Nellie, two of her of black tenants. Debut author Wright intelligently chronicles this tempestuous time in American history, including the ramifications of World War I, the women’s suffrage movement, and the deadly spread of the 1918 influenza pandemic; for such a short novel, it is generously overstuffed with historical significance. The author’s writing is unfailingly lucid and filled with literary allusions, though her tendency is to lean too heavily on melodramatic sermonizing: “Was the whole world chained to its ignorance?” Wright’s depiction of the South, though, is as personally intimate as it is rigorous—she spent summers in Ray’s Mill as a child and based her story partly on love letters she serendipitously stumbled upon. Anne Aletha ultimately emerges as a memorable heroine—she displays a remarkable mix of intellectual depth and a courageous readiness to act boldly.
A thoughtful account of early-20th-century racial tensions weighed down by clumsy moralizing.Pub Date: April 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64066-082-3
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Ardent Writer Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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