A powerful journey into the souls of two lovers, two countries, and the people caught in the wakes of empires.
A tale of love and struggle that crosses decades and continents.
This is Forbes’ (Ghosts, 2014, etc.) fifth work of fiction, and she writes with the confidence and poetic nerve of a seasoned veteran. In 1958, four years before Jamaica’s independence from Britain, a woman named Rachel finds an abandoned baby in a wicker basket. She names him Moshe, or Moses, and raises him as her own. Moshe was born with skin that had not yet fully developed. He’s neither black nor white. He’s bluish, with his veins visible beneath his thin, translucent skin. One eye is blue and the other is brown, and the hair on the front of his head is bleach blond while the hair on the back is black. Moshe’s appearance marks him: “The child seemed to represent some kind of perverse alchemy that had taken place in the deep earth, between tectonic plates, where he was fashioned. People said the boy just looked like sin. Big sin at work when he was made.” As a child, Moshe’s only friend is Arrienne, who in many ways is all that Moshe is not. She is loud, assertive, strong, and, in later years, becomes a political activist. He is solitary, insecure, and quietly artistic. Yet the love between them stretches across decades and follows Moshe as he leaves Jamaica and finds fame as an artist in England. Forbes lets her novel sing with all the languages of Jamaica and Britain. She has an uncanny knack for patois and dialect, including Jamaican English, the Queen’s English, and everything in between. In some ways this book tells a story of a love too deep to become romantic. In other ways it’s a novel of colonialism and its tragic aftermath of racism and economic despair. But most of all, the book is a journey. The characters are so vivid, their depictions so intimate, that the skin of the pages themselves almost pulse beneath the reader’s fingers.
A powerful journey into the souls of two lovers, two countries, and the people caught in the wakes of empires.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61775-751-8
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
A tantalizing, suggestive reconnaissance where the phantasma of other worlds—and private worlds—reveal a disconcerting...
Dr. Montague, an investigator of psychic disturbances, extends an invitation to three young people to join him at Hill House, whose tragic history has made it unfit for human habitation, and where perhaps they can intensify the forces at work.
Eleanor Vance, who had spent eleven years in caring for an invalid mother, is now alone in the world and unwanted—and she has had a poltergeist experience; Theodora is telepathic; and Luke Sanderson is the nephew of the present owner. During the days and nights to follow there are doors that close; drafts that chill; banging and scurrying noises—and writing on the walls. Mrs. Montague arrives—eager to launch a session with planchette and hoping for further materializations beyond these "decided manifestations." But Eleanor becomes increasingly disturbed and distraught; her hoped for close friendship with Theodora is brushed aside—as Theodora goes off alone with Luke; she is the most susceptible to the dark history of this house and attempts to imitate a tragedy in the past; and the story which begins as a spritely tour of the spirit world, ends on a note of real disequilibrium.
A tantalizing, suggestive reconnaissance where the phantasma of other worlds—and private worlds—reveal a disconcerting similarity, and Shirley Jackson's special following will find pause to wonder and admire.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 1959
ISBN: 0140071083
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1959
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Ng's emotionally complex debut novel sucks you in like a strong current and holds you fast until its final secrets surface.
Ng's nuanced debut novel begins with the death of a teenage girl and then uses the mysterious circumstances of her drowning as a springboard to dive into the troubled waters beneath the calm surface of her Chinese-American family.
When 16-year-old Lydia Lee fails to show up at breakfast one spring morning in 1977, and her body is later dragged from the lake in the Ohio college town where she and her biracial family don't quite fit in, her parents—blonde homemaker Marilyn and Chinese-American history professor James—older brother and younger sister get swept into the churning emotional conflicts and currents they've long sought to evade. What, or who, compelled Lydia—a promising student who could often be heard chatting happily on the phone; was doted on by her parents; and enjoyed an especially close relationship with her Harvard-bound brother, Nath—to slip away from home and venture out in a rowboat late at night when she had always been deathly afraid of water, refusing to learn to swim? The surprising answers lie deep beneath the surface, and Ng, whose stories have won awards including the Pushcart Prize, keeps an admirable grip on the narrative's many strands as she expertly explores and exposes the Lee family's secrets: the dreams that have given way to disappointment; the unspoken insecurities, betrayals and yearnings; the myriad ways the Lees have failed to understand one another and, perhaps, themselves. These long-hidden, quietly explosive truths, weighted by issues of race and gender, slowly bubble to the surface of Ng's sensitive, absorbing novel and reverberate long after its final page.
Ng's emotionally complex debut novel sucks you in like a strong current and holds you fast until its final secrets surface.Pub Date: June 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59420-571-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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