A novel with a keen understanding of the complexity of family secrets and the tensions between loving family members.
Taylor’s (Save Our Children, Save Our School, Pearson Broke the Golden Rule, 2014, etc.) debut novel charts the course of a family torn apart by mental illness and revelations about the past.
One morning, when teenage Rosie’s Aunt Sarah returns home from her job as a nurse, it’s clear that she isn’t feeling well. It’s not a typical cold, however; it turns out that she’s had a mental breakdown after getting stuck in an elevator with a patient. Against Rosie’s objections, her parents decide to commit Sarah to an institution to get her the help she needs. As Sarah gradually recovers, she and Rosie correspond via email. Sarah begins to reveal things about Rosie’s family, including their Welsh ancestry. Sarah eventually writes a story called “Rosie’s Umbrella” that refers not to her niece but to a much older relative with the same name. Rosie’s curiosity soon prompts her to research her family history, and she turns up information that’s both profound and unsettling. Part historical tour, part ancestral hunt, and part coming-of-age tale, this novel is an unusual hybrid of teenage angst and genealogical research. The story, told mainly from Rosie’s perspective, attempts to view the wildness of adolescent emotion through a rather mature, grounded, and rational lens: “Emotionally she knew what her mind did not, beyond logic, beyond reason, as if somehow deep inside she felt what Sarah knew.” Taylor uses the first few chapters to thrust readers into events that will later become central to the narrative, although their jarring presentation may be disorienting and puzzling. This quality gradually eases, though, as the novel adopts a more linear structure. The book’s depiction of the pain of buried family history and strained family relationships is poignant and provides its emotional throughline. That said, the author’s use of emails and her choice to increase the font size on the first line of each chapter are stylistically clunky. Overall, though, this is a good read for adolescents and genealogy buffs alike.
A novel with a keen understanding of the complexity of family secrets and the tensions between loving family members.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1942146063
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Garn Press
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Part of Hoffman's great talent is her wonderful ability to sift some magic into unlikely places, such as a latter-day Levittown (Seventh Heaven, 1990) or a community of divorcÇes in Florida (Turtle Moon, 1992). But in her 11th novel, a tale of love and life in New England, it feels as if the lid flew off the jar of magic—it blinds you with fairy dust. Sally and Gillian Owens are orphaned sisters, only 13 months apart, but such opposites in appearance and temperament that they're dubbed ``Day and Night'' by the two old aunts who are raising them. Sally is steady, Gillian is jittery, and each is wary, in her own way, about the frightening pull of love. They've seen the evidence for themselves in the besotted behavior of the women who call on the two aunts for charms and potions to help them with their love lives. The aunts grow herbs, make mysterious brews, and have a houseful of—what else?—black cats. The two girls grow up to flee (in opposite directions) from the aunts, the house, and the Massachusetts town where they've long been shunned by their superstitious schoolmates. What they can't escape is magic, which follows them, sometimes in a particularly malevolent form. And, ultimately, no matter how hard they dodge it, they have to recognize that love always catches up with you. As always, Hoffman's writing has plenty of power. Her best sentences are like incantations—they won't let you get away. But it's just too hard to believe the magic here, maybe because it's not so much practical magic as it is predictable magic, with its crones and bubbling cauldrons and hearts of animals pierced with pins. Sally and Gillian are appealing characters, but, finally, their story seems as murky as one of the aunts' potions—and just as hard to swallow. Too much hocus-pocus, not enough focus. (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: June 14, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14055-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK TO SCREEN
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.
Walker (In Love and Trouble, Meridian) has set herself the task of an epistolary novel—and she scores strongly with it.
The time is in the Thirties; a young, black, Southern woman named Celie is the primary correspondent (God being her usual addressee); and the life described in her letters is one of almost impossible grimness. While young, Celie is raped by a stepfather. (Even worse, she believes him to be her real father.) She's made to bear two children that are then taken away from her. She's married off without her consent to an older man, Albert, who'd rather have Celie's sister Nettie—and, by sacrificing her body to Albert without love or feeling, Celie saves her sister, making it possible for her to escape: soon Nettle goes to Africa to work as a Christian missionary. Eventually, then, halfway through the book, as Celie's sub-literate dialect letters to God continue to mount (eventually achieving the naturalness and intensity of music, equal in beauty to Eudora Welty's early dialect stories), letters from Nettie in Africa begin to arrive. But Celie doesn't see them—because Albert holds them back from her. And it's only when Celie finds an unlikely redeemer—Albert's blues-singer lover Shug Avery—that her isolation ends: Shug takes Celie under her wing, becomes Celie's lover as well as Albert's; Shug's strength and expansiveness and wisdom finally free up Nettie's letters—thus granting poor Celie a tangible life in the now (Shug's love, encouragement) as well as a family life, a past (Nettie's letters). Walker fashions this book beautifully—with each of Celie's letters slowly adding to her independence (the implicit feminism won't surprise Walker's readers), with each letter deepening the rich, almost folk-tale-ish sense of story here. And, like an inverted pyramid, the novel thus builds itself up broadeningly while balanced on the frailest imaginable single point: the indestructibility—and battered-ness—of love.
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.Pub Date: June 28, 1982
ISBN: 0151191549
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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