Four African women hoping for brighter futures find opportunity—and tragedy—working as prostitutes in Belgium.
While standing in the windows of Antwerp’s red-light district (and sexually servicing up to 15 men a day) might not be anyone’s idea of a dream job, it does offer the young immigrant roommates at the heart of this page-turner a chance at a better life. Although their personal motivations differ, they are united by their obligation to Dele, a portly, powerful Nigerian “businessman.” Based in Lagos, he offers them passports and travel expenses with the stipulation that they send him a hefty cut of their earnings each month to pay off their considerable debt. Once in Antwerp they are placed under the care of “Madam,” a hard-nosed African woman with questionable loyalties. Sisi, the most educated of the group, leaves behind a good man, Peter, whose modest ambitions don’t mesh with her big dreams. Efe sacrifices her own happiness to support her young son L.I., who lives back home with her younger sister, while moody Ama flees an abusive stepfather. The youngest, Joyce, was born Alek in Southern Sudan. A survivor of wartime atrocities, including rape, she follows Polycarp, a kindly seeming Nigerian soldier, back to Lagos. But their romance sours when Polycarp’s mother forbids him from marrying the refugee. He then goes to Dele and pays Joyce’s way to Belgium, where she, unlike the other women, initially believes she will be working as a nanny. In spite of her reluctance, her beauty soon attracts a devoted clientele, while she plots to someday open a boutique back in Africa. Sharing a modest apartment, the women bicker and bond until Sisi meets Luc, a white banker, in a Pentecostal church. He pursues her, offering a way out from the brothel. But Sisi’s belief that she can escape Dele’s considerable reach proves to be a fatal mistake, with far-reaching consequences for the others. In her English-language debut, the Nigerian-born Unigwe convincingly exposes an unfamiliar world without sentimentality.
Capable drama that puts a human face on the scourge of human trafficking.
Pub Date: April 26, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6833-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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