A sensitive and vivid coming-of-age account in a compelling setting.
In Sanders’ debut historical novel, a newly motherless boy accompanies his father to Africa on a religious mission.
Eleven-year-old Mark Morgan’s mother died recently, and now he and his dad, Reece, are starting over in western Kenya at a Quaker mission devoted to teacher training. It’s 1966, and Kenya has been an independent nation for only a couple of years; people’s memories of bloody warfare and prison camps are still fresh. Mark gets an inkling of this struggle when he sees what he thinks is a one-armed man slitting someone’s throat. It turns out to be a barber shaving a customer, but the image haunts Mark; that barber, Mr. Okwiri, lost his arm as a child when a paramilitary general cut it off. Other people in the village are marked by similar cruelties, including Layla, an otherworldly girl whose strangeness is related to “bad things” that she experienced in a detention camp. Still, Kenya works its way into Mark’s heart, and he gains new maturity as he makes friends, develops romantic feelings for Layla, and explores the rainforest. Although he experiences danger and witnesses tragedy, by the end of the story—as his best buddy, Raymond “Radio” Mathenge, tells him—Africa has become Mark’s “mother.” Overall, Sanders presents an engagingly written story with a dramatic historical underpinning. Mark is an appealing character who’s thoughtful, open to new experiences, and courageous. Relatively few readers will be familiar with Quaker evangelicalism and its African expression, which gives the novel freshness. The book highlights details of the country’s history and culture in natural ways without ever feeling overly expository, and Sanders handles gruesome events with a sense of dignity for the victims. Mark, who’s white, is the main character, but Kenyan voices are well represented and diverse. Readers should be aware, however, that although the book’s young narrator and the coming-of-age theme might indicate a middle-grade or YA audience, the novel does include a sex scene between underage characters. Also, the book sometimes misrepresents Kenyan folklore, as when it invokes the Native American concept of the “spirit animal.”
A sensitive and vivid coming-of-age account in a compelling setting.Pub Date: April 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9995501-2-0
Page Count: 290
Publisher: New Door Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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