A tragic yet hopeful novel, as ghost-haunted as Appalachia itself.
Nielsen and Robbins, an Appalachian coal miner’s son, tell the fictionalized story of a father’s faith and struggle in this debut novel.
There’s more to coal miner Oakley Grace—known to many as Mournful—than meets the eye. He’s the seventh son of a seventh son, given to having visions of the future. He’s also “probably the most famous funeralizing preacher in Harlan County, Kentucky,” according to his deceased 10-year-old daughter Bud, who narrates Mournful’s story from the wrong side of death’s door. It’s the Great Depression, and mining is difficult, dangerous, exhausting work; after the company deducts “rent, fuel coal, doctor’s fees and scrip advances for groceries,” miners were paid “only a few pennies, or nothing at all.” When union talk starts up in Harlan County, the mine operators—who also own the police and the local doctor—clamp down hard, and Mournful has an enemy in his former boyhood friend Cork Markham, the son of the mine superintendent. This engaging story—first scribbled “on notebook pages, old receipts and backs of envelopes” by Robbins and shaped into a novel by Nielsen—is anchored in authentic language, description and characters. Appalachia’s natural beauty, tragic history and culture, as appealingly presented here, may be familiar from “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (the song, book and film) and the Oscar-winning 1976 documentary Harlan County, USA, among other sources. The novel effectively portrays elements that readers might expect, such as moonshiners, mine collapses and tent revivals, and the characters speak in a folksy, if somewhat repetitive, diction. Even in the novel’s lightest moments, a keen awareness of death seems ever-present. Bud’s Grandma Cora, for example, is so fiercely independent that she spends four months digging her own grave with “a soup spoon from the kitchen” so she could “look out yonder and see her handiwork and know, even in this last thing, she didn’t need anyone.”
A tragic yet hopeful novel, as ghost-haunted as Appalachia itself.Pub Date: March 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1480229235
Page Count: 256
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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