Flawlessly interweaving personal and social tragedy with the imagery of interior and exterior spaces. Jamaica-born Hemans’s...
A remarkably assured and insightful debut offers a finely tuned, sympathetic portrait of a teenaged mother whose toddler drowns accidentally in the river where she’s washing clothes.
The drowning of young Timothy is over in a flash, or so it seems to Kelithe when his body is brought to her by the other women of the river. Then the rumors start that Kelithe watched her son as he went under, seeing it as the way to escape from rural, impoverished Standfast to New York, where her mother went when Kelithe was five, promising “soon-soon” to send for her. By the time Sonya, who hasn’t been back to Standfast for 15 years, arrives for the funeral, the whole village has turned against her daughter, enraged by the fact that the police didn’t even investigate the accident. Though Sonya has been sending Kelithe food and clothes over the years, she finds her daughter a stranger and doesn’t know who to believe. Kelithe, hopeful at first that Sonya will make good on the recently renewed promise to take her back to America, waits in silence and in vain for her mother to ask for her side of the story and to comfort her numbing grief. Meanwhile, Sonya’s own mother, who has raised Kelithe in Standfast and knows her innocent heart, watches bitterly as Sonya accepts the gossip and turns from them. Emboldened villagers intensify their campaign for justice: they build smoky roadblocks, burn the only bridge they have across the river, and finally get the attention they crave—but at a terrible price. By the time little Timothy is finally buried, a great deal more than one small life is interred.
Flawlessly interweaving personal and social tragedy with the imagery of interior and exterior spaces. Jamaica-born Hemans’s rare and distinctive debut is not only a tale for our time, but one for all time.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-1039-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.
A first collection from Irish-born Keegan spans the Atlantic, touching down in rural Ireland and the southern US—with results often familiar or stretched-for, yet deftly done and alluringly readable.
In the title story, a happily married woman wants to find out what it’s like to have sex with someone else—and does so indeed, in a psychological clunker that crosses Hitchcock with O. Henry while remaining ever-intriguing to the eye. A near-wizardry of language and detail, too, closes the volume, with “The Ginger Rogers Sermon,” when a pubescent girl in Ireland, sexually curious, brings about the suicide of a hulking lumberman in a tone-perfect but morally inert story. In between are longer and shorter, greater and lesser tales. Among the better are “Men and Women,” about a suffering Irish farmwife who at last rebels against a cruelly domineering husband; the southern-set “Ride If You Dare,” about a couple who shyly meet after running personals ads; and “Stay Close to the Water’s Edge,” about a Harvard student who despises—and is despised by—his millionaire stepfather. Psychologically more thin or commonplace are “Storms,” told by an Irish daughter whose mother went mad; “Where the Water’s Deepest,” a snippet about an au pair afraid of “losing” her charge; or “The Singing Cashier”—based on fact, we’re rather pointlessly told—about a couple who, unbeknownst to their neighbors, commit “hideous acts on teenage girls.” Keegan’s best include the more maturely conceived “Passport Soup,” about a man devoured by guilt and grief after his daughter goes missing while in his care; “Quare Name for a Boy,” in which a young woman, pregnant by a single-fling boyfriend whom she no longer has an interest in, determines that she’ll go on into motherhood without him; and the nicely sustained “Sisters”—one dutiful and plain, the other lovely and self-indulgent—who come to a symbolically perfect end.
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-779-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
