An extraordinarily moving tale from Lesley (The Sky Fisherman, 1995, etc.) of an idealistic Caucasian father’s agonizing relationship with his adopted son, a Tlingit Indian boy cursed with fetal alcohol syndrome and an abusive childhood. By adopting Wade, a charming, energetic six-year-old orphan whose hands are scarred from physical abuse, Oregon community-college professor Clark Woods hopes he will somehow atone for Emmett Woods, the man who walked out on Clark and his mother, Grace, shortly after Clark was born. Clark’s Tlingit wife, Payette, who doesn—t want children of her own, agrees to the situation at first, then becomes estranged from Clark as Wade becomes an increasing burden. Hyperactive and prone to sudden acts of violence, the boy also has severe learning disabilities and suffers hallucinations in which he sees whales, otters, and other Alaskan wildlife with totemic significance, in places where no such creatures exist. Special classes and therapy sessions fail to help him. When Payette walks out, Clark’s mother moves in to help. Grace can—t watch Wade all the time, and, when a neighbor’s two-year-old drowns in a drainage culvert, police suspect that Wade, who blamed the accident on a whale, may have harmed the girl. Charges aren—t filed, yet Clark is tormented with doubt as Wade grows older, stronger, and more dangerous. Natalie, Clark’s second wife, loves the boy but fears he may harm their baby daughter, Helen, until Clark puts Wade in a group home. Wade runs off from the home and goes on a crime spree, forcing Clark to follow the last-chance advice of Dr. RealBird, a part-Indian child therapist who believes that returning Wade to his tribe might give the boy what Clark cannot. Though slow and meandering, the story gradually builds to a mystically uplifting take on the eternal distances separating fathers and sons, as well as a larger metaphor for the estrangement that both isolates and protects Indian culture from mainstream America.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-24554-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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