A thoughtful, moving meditation on connections to the past and the land that humans abandon at their peril.
A Native American woman reclaims her family and her people’s history in Dakhóta writer Wilson’s first novel.
A keening poem, “The Seeds Speak,” sets the novel’s tone in its opening pages, recalling a time when “Because we cared for each other, the People and the Seeds survived” and lamenting the “drought of memory, a time of endless darkness” that followed. Rosalie Iron Wing’s story is emblematic of the deliberate destruction of Native American families and traditions by the U.S. government. Raised by her father, at age 12 she was placed in White foster care after he died and endured six years of misery “waiting for someone to come for me.” (She doesn't know that her great-aunt fruitlessly tried to find her.) At 18, she marries John Meister, a kind White farmer grappling with the changes introduced by chemical fertilizers and the new genetically modified seeds being pushed by a company building a plant in town. (John, a good man who is nonetheless clueless about how his family’s fortunes were built on the theft of Native lands, is notable in a cast of strong secondary characters that also includes Rosalie’s feisty activist friend Gaby Makespeace.) As the novel opens in 2002, John has recently died, most likely poisoned by the chemicals their son, Tommy, encouraged him to use on their fields. Tommy’s conflict between his Native heritage and modern “progress” seethes under the surface of Rosalie’s journey back to the cabin along the Minnesota River from which she was taken 28 years earlier. Her memories unfold in conjunction with the stories of her great-aunt Darlene, about the tragic history of the Dakhóta. Uprooted from their land, the seeds Dakhóta women carried with them were not just a source of sustenance, but their link to the past and hope for the future, a symbol of their profound bond with the Earth. They provide a powerful symbol for Rosalie’s rediscovery of her lost family and the ways of “the old ones.”
A thoughtful, moving meditation on connections to the past and the land that humans abandon at their peril.Pub Date: March 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-57131-137-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
This tender, strange treatise on getting out from the “prefab structures” of a conventional life is quintessentially July.
A woman set to embark on a cross-country road trip instead drives to a nearby motel and becomes obsessed with a local man.
According to Harris, the husband of the narrator of July’s novel, everyone in life is either a Parker or a Driver. “Drivers,” Harris says, “are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring.” The narrator knows she’s a Parker, someone who needs “a discrete task that seems impossible, something…for which they might receive applause.” For the narrator, a “semi-famous” bisexual woman in her mid-40s living in Los Angeles, this task is her art; it’s only by haphazard chance that she’s fallen into a traditional straight marriage and motherhood. When the narrator needs to be in New York for work, she decides on a solo road trip as a way of forcing herself to be more of a metaphorical Driver. She makes it all of 30 minutes when, for reasons she doesn’t quite understand, she pulls over in Monrovia. After encountering a man who wipes her windows at a gas station and then chats with her at the local diner, she checks in to a motel, where she begins an all-consuming intimacy with him. For the first time in her life, she feels truly present. But she can only pretend to travel so long before she must go home and figure out how to live the rest of a life that she—that any woman in midlife—has no map for. July’s novel is a characteristically witty, startlingly intimate take on Dante’s “In the middle of life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood”—if the dark wood were the WebMD site for menopause and a cheap room at the Excelsior Motel.
This tender, strange treatise on getting out from the “prefab structures” of a conventional life is quintessentially July.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780593190265
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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