The sordid history of Florida’s turpentine camps is riveting; the characters less so.
A Muscogee woman and a World War I veteran try to save the soldier’s sister and brother-in-law, held against their will in a brutal turpentine camp in 1920s Florida.
Scott Hampton comes from New York to northern Florida to search for his missing sister, Sarah, and her husband, Franklin, who’d gone south for work only to be imprisoned in a turpentine camp run by the ruthless Captain Riggs. Also held there is Martha LongFoot, the daughter of a Muscogee woman and a slave, who grew up as Riggs’ sexual captive and now serves as the camp’s resident “Medicine Woman.” (Martha narrates half the story, describing life inside the camp, while the rest is told in the third person). Wimberley (Devil’s Slew, 2011, etc) does a nice job keeping up the suspense as Hampton searches for his relations, and those unfamiliar with the history of camps like these will find no shortage of fascinating—and horrifying—context: from how debtors (and others) were essentially enslaved in them to the particulars of how workers extract resin from pines for turpentine. But while readers may be new to the history here, they’ll likely find the characters more familiar, from the brave (and bland) leading man to a bevy of recognizable villains (an oily attorney, an underhanded judge, the sadistic Riggs, etc.). Wimberley’s most memorable creation is Martha, who endures a monstrous childhood—and is severely disfigured, for reasons readers will later learn—to become one of the camp’s savviest operators. But in highlighting Martha’s resilience, Wimberley comes a bit too close to buying into the "magical minority" trope, in which a person of color has almost otherworldly wisdom or skills. Indeed, she can “lift a man onto a mule,” shoot a squirrel square in the neck (so as not “to mess up the meat”), and cure various ailments, all while recounting her life in vivid prose. Ultimately, a more nuanced characterization would have better served the story—and the reader.
The sordid history of Florida’s turpentine camps is riveting; the characters less so.Pub Date: June 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-91-7637-036-0
Page Count: 312
Publisher: l'Aleph/Wisehouse
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
