A vibrant, gritty urban character study rich in cultural relevance, social gravitas, and interpersonal drama.
A diverse community of young men struggles with challenging queer realities in this novel.
Author and former social worker Ambrose crafts a moving profile of racial unrest and social injustice through an ethnic melting pot of young gay men living and loving in Philadelphia. Headlining the action is Babe, a queer Black youth with a “mass of thick dreadlocks” raised in the predominantly White Pennsylvania suburbs. He yearns to live a life unencumbered by racial stereotypes. The story opens in a gay bar where Babe meets Chance, a Black, cheeky, so-called wigger, who wears his pants baggy and sports purple cornrows. Chance becomes a nice distraction from Babe’s faltering relationship with Matthew, whom he suspects of cheating and using crack. Things end badly when a violent barroom brawl erupts between Babe and Matthew. Suddenly single, Babe rents out the now-vacant room in his duplex to Alise, a troubled woman of faith with a housing subsidy, an errant husband, and a son. But Babe inexplicably also invites Chance to move in as his roommate. Driven by instinct since childhood, Babe senses an opportunity to help both Alise and Chance with more than a place to live, offering them a prospect for happiness. Soon, Chance attempts to romance Babe, despite jealous Matthew resurfacing to create more melodrama. In his debut novel, State of the Nation(2018), Ambrose demonstrated a skill for characterization in his portrayal of Black teenagers living in Atlanta as a serial killer stalked the city. Here, he again intensifies the narrative with both solid characterization and a plot that generates a very realistic portrait of what it’s like to be Black in America, including scenes of Babe and Chance encountering police harassment and homophobia. There are also impressively descriptive passages throughout, demonstrating the author’s gift for introspective language, as when he evokes the concept of the inner city as “a mythic imaginarium created by white flight—barbaric microcosms within the city proper where crime and vice ruled over morality and decency.” Ambrose incorporates many heady themes, like racism, bullying, mental health, and queer identity, into a story that is smoothly written and engrossing from start to finish. The author is a writer to watch.
A vibrant, gritty urban character study rich in cultural relevance, social gravitas, and interpersonal drama.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-64890-248-2
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Ninestar Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.
An undergraduate at Brown University unearths the buried history of a Latine artist.
As in her bestselling debut, Olga Dies Dreaming (2022), Gonzalez shrewdly anatomizes racial and class hierarchies. Her bifurcated novel begins at a posh art-world party in 1985 as the title character, a Cuban American land and body artist, garners recognition that threatens the ego of her older, more famous husband, white minimalist sculptor Jack Martin. The story then shifts to Raquel Toro, whose working-class, Puerto Rican background makes her feel out of place among the “Art History Girls” who easily chat with professors and vacation in Europe. Nonetheless, in the spring of 1998, Raquel wins a prestigious summer fellowship at the Rhode Island School of Design, and her faculty adviser is enthusiastic about her thesis on Jack Martin, even if she’s not. Soon she’s enjoying the attentions of Nick Fitzsimmons, a well-connected, upper-crust senior. As Raquel’s story progresses, Anita’s first-person narrative acquires a supernatural twist following the night she falls from the window of their apartment —“jumped? or, could it be, pushed?”—but it’s grimly realistic in its exploration of her toxic relationship with Jack. (A dedication, “In memory of Ana,” flags the notorious case of sculptor Carl Andre, tried and acquitted for the murder of his wife, artist Ana Mendieta.) Raquel’s affair with Nick mirrors that unequal dynamic when she adapts her schedule and appearance to his whims, neglecting her friends and her family in Brooklyn. Gonzalez, herself a Brown graduate, brilliantly captures the daily slights endured by someone perceived as Other, from microaggressions (Raquel’s adviser refers to her as “Mexican”) to brutally racist behavior by the Art History Girls. While a vividly rendered supporting cast urges Raquel to be true to herself and her roots, her research on Martin leads to Anita’s art and the realization that she belongs to a tradition that’s been erased from mainstream art history.
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781250786210
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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