A very strong first novel that blends tough realism with the appealing strangeness of a fever dream.
Voodoo, faith and racism converge in an East Texas town—particularly within the troubled titular heroine—in this bracing debut novel.
When we first meet Ruby Bell, she’s a symbol of local disgrace: It’s 1974, and a decade earlier she returned to her hometown of Liberty seemingly gone crazy. The local rumor mill (mostly centered around the church) ponders a host of reasons: the lynching of her aunt; her being forced into prostitution as a child; a stint in New York, where she was the rare black woman in a white highbrow literary milieu. The only person who doesn't keep his distance is Ephram, a middle-aged man who braves the town’s mockery and the mad squalor of Ruby’s home to reconnect with her. Bond presents Ruby as a symbol of a century’s worth of abuse toward African-Americans; as one local puts it, “Hell, ain’t nothing strange when Colored go crazy. Strange is when we don’t.” The echoes of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison are clear, but Bond is an accomplished enough writer to work in a variety of modes with skill and insight. She conjures Ruby’s fun-house-mirror mind with harrowing visions of voodoo ceremonies and the ghosts of dead children, yet she also delivers plainspoken descriptions of young Ruby’s experience in a brothel, surrounded by horrid men. And Bond can be sharply funny, satirizing the high-toned sanctimony of Liberty’s churchgoers (especially Ephram’s sister Celia) that’s really a cover for hypocritical pride and fear. Some of the more intense passages of the novel lapse into purple prose, and the horror of Ruby’s experience (which intensifies as the novel moves along) makes her closing redemption feel somewhat pat. But the force of Ruby’s character, and Bond’s capacity to describe it, is undeniable.
A very strong first novel that blends tough realism with the appealing strangeness of a fever dream.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3909-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
PROFILES
You will never forget Shuggie Bain. Scene by scene, this book is a masterpiece.
Alcoholism brutally controls the destiny of a beautiful woman and her children in working-class Scotland.
The way Irvine Welsh’s Trainspottingcarved a permanent place in our heads and hearts for the junkies of late-1980s Edinburgh, the language, imagery, and story of fashion designer Stuart’s debut novel apotheosizes the life of the Bain family of Glasgow. Stunning, raven-haired Agnes Bain is often compared to Elizabeth Taylor. When we meet her in 1981, she’s living with her parents and three “weans” in a crowded high-rise flat in a down-and-out neighborhood called Sighthill. Her second husband, Hugh "Shug" Bain, father of her youngest, Shuggie, is a handsome taxi driver with a philandering problem that is racing alongside Agnes’ drinking problem to destroy their never-very-solid union. In indelible, patiently crafted vignettes covering the next 11 years of their lives, we watch what happens to Shuggie and his family. Stuart evokes the experience of each character with unbelievable compassion—Agnes; her mother, Lizzie; Shug; their daughter, Catherine, who flees the country the moment she can; artistically gifted older son Leek; and the baby of the family, Shuggie, bullied and outcast from toddlerhood for his effeminate walk and manner. Shuggie’s adoration of his mother is the light of his life, his compass, his faith, embodied in his ability to forgive her every time she resurrects herself from a binge: “She was no use at maths homework, and some days you could starve rather than get a hot meal from her, but Shuggie looked at her now and understood this was where she excelled. Everyday with the make-up on and her hair done, she climbed out of her grave and held her head high. When she had disgraced herself with drink, she got up the next day, put on her best coat, and faced the world. When her belly was empty and her weans were hungry, she did her hair and let the world think otherwise.” How can love be so powerful and so helpless at the same time? Readers may get through the whole novel without breaking down—then read the first sentence of the acknowledgements and lose it. The emotional truth embodied here will crack you open.
You will never forget Shuggie Bain. Scene by scene, this book is a masterpiece.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4804-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
An impressive addition to the library of historical fiction on the Civil War, worthy of a place alongside The Killer Angels,...
A thunderous, action-rich first novel of the Civil War, based on historical fact.
Music publisher Hicks treats a long-overlooked episode of the war in this account of the Battle of Franklin, Tenn., which took place in November 1864 near Nashville. As a field hospital is pitched in her field, Carrie McGavock, an iron-spined farm woman and upstanding citizen of the town, takes it upon herself to tend after the Confederate wounded; later, she and her husband will rebury 1,500 of the fallen on their property. Hicks centers much of the story on Carrie, who has seen her own children die of illness and who has endurance in her blood. “I was not a morbid woman,” Carrie allows, “but if death wanted to confront me, well, I would not turn my head. Say what you have to say to me, or leave me alone.” Other figures speak their turn. One is a young Union officer amazed at the brutal and sometimes weird tableaux that unfold before him; as the bullets fly, he pauses before a 12-year-old rebel boy suffocating under the weight of his piled-up dead comrades. “Suffocated. I had never considered the possibility,” young Lt. Stiles sighs. Another is an Arkansas soldier taken prisoner by the Yankees: “I became a prisoner and accepted all the duties of a prisoner just as easily as I’d picked up the damned colors and walked forward to the bulwarks.” Yet another is Nathan Forrest, who would strike fear in many a heart as a Confederate cavalryman, and later as the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Hicks renders each of these figures with much attention to historical detail and a refreshing lack of genre cliché, closing with a subtle lament for the destruction of history before the bulldozer: “One longs to know that some things don’t change, that some of us will not be forgotten, that our perambulations upon the earth are not without point or destination.”
An impressive addition to the library of historical fiction on the Civil War, worthy of a place alongside The Killer Angels, Rifles for Watie and Shiloh.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-446-50012-7
Page Count: 404
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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