Romantic and tumultuous adventures that vividly distill a century of battles for women’s equality.
A novel follows several generations of women in a lineage inspired by an ancient amulet.
Hurricane Sandy is bearing down on New York City’s Rockaway Peninsula. Seventeen-year-old Maya Jones arrives at the Sea View Nursing Home to rescue her 105-year-old great-grandmother Maddy Rosario. Maya instructs Maddy to bring only important keepsakes, including a portrait of her mother and some framed pictures. There’s also a crystalline amulet—which can’t be found. When the women get stuck in the nursing home elevator, the narrative flashes back to 1905, to the life of Madeline Gallacuty, who’s been branded hysterical and is receiving the dismally confining Cure. While confined to her room for six weeks, she finds a crystal pendant hidden in her vanity’s drawer. An accompanying note says, “Know who you are,” signed, The Whale Rider. Once wearing the pendant, Madeline summons the strength of character to forge her own path in life, marry the man of her choosing, and become an advocate for women’s equality. Later, the meteorite-infused crystal ennobles Maddy, a fun-loving 1920s girl; Marjorie Berthe Hansman, a midcentury painter; and Mary Jane Johnson, a women’s libber active in 1970s India, to focus their talents and make strides for gender equality. Culler (101 Ways Your Mother Said You Could Die, 2015, etc.) uses a tense framing sequence to invigorate glimpses into eras when women were considered delicate, obedient, and often beneath notice. The flashbacks are rife with pointedly heartbreaking moments, as when Madeline’s cousin Lucy Fleming tells her, “Your highest duty in marriage is to suffer and be still.” Culler emphasizes not only the feminist, but the humanist perspective as well when World War I veteran Martin Amberfitch thinks: “Surely it was time to rebuild the world, not wallow in its distracting luxuries.” The nested tales are so lovingly rendered that readers will likely wish for further flashbacks to illuminate the lives of the Celtic Queen Cartimandua—in whose tomb the jewel originated—and Mr. Gallacuty’s part-Maori stepsister, The Whale Rider herself.
Romantic and tumultuous adventures that vividly distill a century of battles for women’s equality.Pub Date: Feb. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-63521-6
Page Count: 358
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Lincoln Rhyme, the quadriplegic criminalist of The Bone Collector (1997), returns to confront the uncannily resourceful killer who’s been hired to eliminate three witnesses in the last hours before their grand jury testimony. The first witness is no challenge for the Coffin Dancer, so dubbed after his distinctive tattoo: He simply plants a bomb on Hudson Air pilot/vice-president Edward Carney’s flight to Chicago and waits for the TV news. But Ed’s murder alerts the two other witnesses against millionaire entrepreneur-cum-weapons-stealer Phillip Hansen, and also alerts the NYPD and the FBI that both those witnesses—Ed’s widow, Hudson Air president Percey Clay, and her old friend and fellow-pilot Brit Hale—are on the hot seat. With 45 hours left before they’re scheduled to testify against Hansen, they bring Rhyme and his eyes and ears, New York cop Amelia Sachs, into the case. Their job: to gather enough information about the Coffin Dancer from trace evidence at the crime scene (for a start, scrapings from the tires of the emergency vehicles that responded to the Chicago crash) to nail him, or at least to predict his next move and head him off. The resulting game of cat and mouse is even more far-fetched than in The Bone Collector—both Rhyme and the Dancer are constantly subject to unbelievably timely hunches and brain waves that keep their deadly shuttlecock in play down to the wire—but just as grueling, as the Dancer keeps on inching closer to his targets by killing bystanders whose death scenes in turn provide Rhyme and Sachs with new, ever more precise evidence against him. Fair warning to newcomers: Author Deaver is just as cunning and deceptive as his killer; don’t assume he’s run out of tricks until you’ve run out of pages. For forensics buffs: Patricia Cornwell attached to a time bomb. For everybody else: irresistibly overheated melodrama, with more twists than Chubby Checker. (First printing of 100,000; Literary Guild main selection)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-85285-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
Twenty-six tales by the 1982 Nobel Prize Winner, rearranged in roughly chronological order of writing. From the 1968 collection No One Writes to the Colonel come stories of the town of Macondo—about the much-delayed funeral of local sovereign Big Mamma, a dentist's revenge on the corrupt Mayor (extraction sans anesthetic), a priest who sees the Devil, a thief who robs the pool hall of its billiard balls. But the collection's standout—its title novella—is not included here. Likewise, the long title piece from the Leaf Storm collection (1972)—also about a Colonel—is omitted; but it does offer "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" and other beguiling fantasies. And, from 1978's Innocent Erendira And Other Stories comes an uneven mix of mystical fable and diffuse surrealism (some pieces dating, before English translation, from the 1940s or '50s). Much that's brilliant, some that's merely strange and fragmentary, and almost all enhanced by the translations of Gregory Rabassa and S. J. Bernstein.
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 1984
ISBN: 0060932686
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1984
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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