A short, masterful work about creative consciousness in the land.
A brilliant, artistically ambitious retelling of the familiar tale of the Shoshoni tribeswoman who accompanied Lewis and Clark.
Sacajawea’s story has been retold many times, notably in Anna Lee Waldo’s massive (over 1,400 pages) 1979 paperback, Sacajawea (a historical with a romantic subplot), and, more recently, in Brian Hall’s superb I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company (p. 1494). Now, prizewinning poet and novelist Glancy, of Cherokee and German-English descent, offers us instead a kind of spiritual take, grindingly gritty yet webbed with supernatural ghostbreath. We all know that Native Americans can scan and hear news from the Otherworld as easily as New Yorkers read the Times. Still, some may at first resist Glancy’s strategies, since she has once again, as in The Mask Maker (2002), adopted a distracting layout that has Sacajawea’s present-tense voice broken constantly by framed inserts from Lewis and Clark’s diaries, which bear upon the moment. Sacajawea herself, according to the grandmother who dreamed of finding a white stone shaped like a beaver, bears this white stone heart in her spirit—and she needs a rocklike heart to rise above the endless privations of the expedition, as when cottonwood trees grow so cold that water within makes them explode like cannonfire (a temperature of 45 below zero, Clark notes). Sacajawea, kidnapped by the Hidatasa tribe, was later sold and married to Canadian trapper Toussaint Charbonneau, who already had Otter Woman as a mate. Pregnant, Sacajawea feared she’d be left behind. Instead, she carried her son on her back through terrifying illnesses and dangers, her soothing songs to him getting her named Bird Woman. She is torn, wants to stay in her starving Shoshoni village when the explorers pass through it, but goes on to Oregon and the Pacific.
A short, masterful work about creative consciousness in the land.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2003
ISBN: 1-58567-365-X
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A captivating start to what promises to be an epic post-apocalyptic fable.
The first volume in Carey’s Rampart trilogy is set centuries into a future shaped by war and climate change, where the scant remains of humankind are threatened by genetically modified trees and plants.
Teenager Koli Woodsmith lives in Mythen Rood, a village of about 200 people in a place called Ingland, which has other names such as “Briton and Albion and Yewkay.” He was raised to cultivate, and kill, the wood from the dangerous trees beyond Mythen Rood’s protective walls. Mythen Rood is governed by the Ramparts (made up entirely of members of one family—what a coincidence), who protect the village with ancient, solar-powered tech. After the Waiting, a time in which each child, upon turning 15, must decide their future, Koli takes the Rampart test: He must “awaken” a piece of old tech. After he inevitably fails, he steals a music player which houses a charming “manic pixie dream girl” AI named Monono, who reveals a universe of knowledge. Of course, a little bit of knowledge can threaten entire societies or, in Koli’s case, a village held in thrall to a family with unfettered access to powerful weapons. Koli attempts to use the device to become a Rampart, he becomes their greatest threat, and he’s exiled to the world beyond Mythen Rood. Luckily, the pragmatic Koli has his wits, Monono, and an ally in Ursala, a traveling doctor who strives to usher in a healthy new generation of babies before humanity dies out for good. Koli will need all the help he can get, especially when he’s captured by a fearsome group ruled by a mad messianic figure who claims to have psychic abilities. Narrator Koli’s inquisitive mind and kind heart make him the perfect guide to Carey’s (Someone Like Me, 2018, etc.) immersive, impeccably rendered world, and his speech and way of life are different enough to imagine the weight of what was lost but still achingly familiar, and as always, Carey leavens his often bleak scenarios with empathy and hope. Readers will be thrilled to know the next two books will be published in short order.
A captivating start to what promises to be an epic post-apocalyptic fable.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-47753-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Orbit/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A frank look at the complexities of family, race and culture.
A Chinese family spanning the U.S. and the Netherlands grapples with the disappearance of one of their own.
Twenty-six-year-old Amy Lee is living in her parents’ cramped Queens apartment when she gets a frantic call from Lukas Tan, the Dutch second cousin she’s never met. Her successful older sister, Sylvie, who had flown to the Netherlands to see their ailing grandmother, is missing. Amy’s questions only mount as she looks into Sylvie’s disappearance. Why does Sylvie’s husband, Jim, look so bedraggled when Amy tracks him down, and why are all his belongings missing from the Brooklyn Heights apartment he and Sylvie share? Why is Sylvie no longer employed by her high-powered consulting firm? And when Amy finally musters up the courage to travel to the Netherlands for the first time, why do her relatives—the Tan family, including Lukas and his parents, Helena and Willem—act so strangely whenever Sylvie is brought up? Amy’s search is interlaced with chapters from Sylvie’s point of view from a month earlier as she returns to the Netherlands, where she had been sent as a baby by parents who couldn't afford to keep her, to be raised by the Tans. As Amy navigates fraught police visits and her own rising fears, she gradually uncovers the family’s deepest secrets, some of them decades old. Though the novel is rife with romantic entanglements and revelations that wouldn’t be amiss in a soap opera, its emotional core is the bond between the Lee sisters, one of mutual devotion and a tinge of envy. Their intertwined relationship is mirrored in the novel’s structure—their alternating chapters, separated in time and space, echo each other. Both ride the same bike through the Tans’ village, both encounter the same dashing cellist. Kwok (Mambo in Chinatown, 2014, etc.), who lives in the Netherlands, is eloquent on the clumsy, overt racism Chinese people face there: “Sometimes I think that because we Dutch believe we are so emancipated, we become blind to the faults in ourselves,” one of her characters says. But the book is a meditation not just on racism, but on (not) belonging: “When you were different,” Sylvie thinks, “who knew if it was because of a lack of social graces or the language barrier or your skin color?”
A frank look at the complexities of family, race and culture.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-283430-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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