A love letter to the razzle-dazzle of ’30s San Francisco and the wonders of Treasure Island.
The lives of a reporter, a Japanese diplomat, and an art scholar intertwine in Nelson’s (Dreaming Mill Valley, 2012) historical novel set in the 1930s.
It’s 1936, and an island is emerging in San Francisco Bay—Treasure Island, the site of the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. The city is abuzz as the island transforms from “soupy muck” to a fair featuring such exhibits as a Japanese Pavilion, a carnivalesque Gayway, and the “Court of the Seven Seas.” Lily Nordby is a tenacious young newspaper reporter assigned the Treasure Island beat; Tokido Okamura, a Japanese diplomat, resides on the ship Tatuta Maru and is overseeing the creation of the Japanese Pavilion; and Mayan-art expert Woodrow Packard, who has dwarfism, has recently returned from travels in Chichén Itzá. Their work throws them together again and again, but, as Lily and Tokido’s relationship deepens, Woodrow grows suspicious of the Japanese government’s intentions in America, particularly as their aggression in China continues. Meanwhile, Lily receives news that her long-lost mother is alive somewhere in San Francisco. Nelson pays careful attention to the facts of the exposition and offers nostalgia for the San Francisco of the past as she brings the wonders of the Golden Gate Bridge and the marvel of Treasure Island to life. (Black-and-white photographs from the real-life exposition are included.) Often, however, she includes historical information in dialogue, apparently more for the reader’s benefit than for any organic, narrative purpose. Still, this material is interesting enough that readers likely won’t mind. The characters’ actions and decisions don’t carry much emotional weight, but they do allow readers to happily explore the exposition’s glamour and kitsch, including a movie supposedly featuring “nudists playing volleyball” and “a woman poised to swallow neon glass tubes.”
A love letter to the razzle-dazzle of ’30s San Francisco and the wonders of Treasure Island.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-334-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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