Another in that appealing line of grace-under-pressure heroines. Gershten’s first is also the first to win Barbara...
An impressive debut about a strong woman often knocked down but never dragged out.
Guadalupe Magdalena Molina Vasquez ("Magda") was born into a culture that didn't value her. In her hardscrabble section of Mexico, females cooked, cleaned, nursed, fulfilled their sexual obligations, cooperated in reproducing the species, and obeyed masculine directives no matter how mindless. Outside of that, they were expected to keep their mouths shut and go to church a lot. From the beginning, though, it was clear that Magda Vasquez was subversive. Brainy, plucky, instinctively rebellious—and drop-dead beautiful—she always knew that Teatlán couldn't hold her and that whatever trick or exploitation she might resort to was legitimized by the requirements of the life force: that is, by her need to escape the choking grip of xenophobic Teatlán. With money garnered illicitly and a dress stolen from her sister, she finally flees, rides a bus into the big city, Tijuana, and there begins the journey that transforms Magda the innocent into Magda the elegant—a full-fledged woman of the world. But it's a bumpy journey even so. Following its erratic twists and turns, Magda moves from reluctant go-go dancer to pampered wife of a rich Mexican aristocrat to adored wife of an American professor. She becomes a mother, loses her child, then finds a way to regain her even though it costs her dearly. Experience teaches Magda hard lessons, how to endure misery, cope with happiness, and muddle through the in-betweens. She learns "the value of a good enemy" and that "the hardest failure is when you fail yourself"—which the indomitable Magda never does.
Another in that appealing line of grace-under-pressure heroines. Gershten’s first is also the first to win Barbara Kingsolver's Bellworth Prize, awarded "for a work of socially or politically engaged fiction." Stronger even than that, however, is the emotional engagement here.Pub Date: March 2, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018567-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Top-flight fantasy collection based on Gaiman's character The Sandman, developed in a series of graphic novels for DC Comics, as reimagined by a strong group of fantasists. Long-lived comics readers will remember fondly the original "Sandman" from the 1930s and '40s, with his fedora, googly-eyed gas mask and gas gun; Frank McConnell discusses this precursor in his preface while hauling in Joyce, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Jung, and Wallace Stevens to dress up Gaiman's stow-parentage. Inventing his own lore for the character, Gaiman (1990's hilariously naughty Good Omens, with Terry Pratchett) wrote 75 installments of The Sandman before closing shop. Awash with watercolors and supersaturated with acid, The Sandman stories are stories about storytelling, celebrations of the outr‚ imagination. The central character of Gaiman's work evolved into a figure variously known as Dream, or Morpheus, or the Shaper, or the Lord of Dreams and Prince of Stories, and his surreal family is called the Endless, composed of seven siblings named Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium. Drawing on Gaiman's inkwell are Clive Barker (frontispiece but no story), Gene Wolfe and Nancy A. Collins, and a number of lesser lights, all in top form. George Alec Effinger invents a long tale inspired by Winsor McCay's classic comic strip "Little Nemo" ("Seven Nights in Slumberland"), while Colin Greenland ("Masquerade and High Water"), Mark Kreighbaum ("The Gate of Gold"), Susanna Clarke ("Stopt-Clock Yard"), and Karen Haber (in the outstanding "A Bone Dry Place," about a suicide crisis center) mainline directly from the ranks of the Endless. Rosettes to all, but especially to John M. Ford's "Chain Home, Low," which ties an onslaught of sleeping sickness to the fate of WW II fighter pilots, and to Will Shetterly's "Splatter," about a fan-convention of serial killers who lead their favorite novelist (famous for his depictions of psychopathic murderers) into the real world of serial-killing. Fancy unleashed on rags of moonlight.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-100833-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
Unabashedly over the top at times but, still, a saga that gives rise to as much amusement as it does sober reflection. A...
In a witty, wacky, and endlessly erudite debut, DeWitt assembles everything from letters of the Greek alphabet to Fourier analysis to tell the tale of a boy prodigy, stuffed with knowledge beyond his years but frustrated by his mother’s refusal to identify his father.
Sibylla and five-year-old Ludovic are quite a pair, riding round and round on the Circle Line in London’s Underground while he reads the Odyssey in the original and she copes with the inevitable remarks by fellow passengers. Sibylla, an expatriate American making a living as a typist, herself possesses formidable intelligence, but her eccentricities are just as noteworthy. Believing Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai to be a film without peer, she watches it day after day, year after year, while in the one-night stand with Ludo’s father-to-be, she wound up in bed with him for no better reason than it wouldn’t have been polite not to, although subsequently she has nothing but scorn for his utterly conventional (if successful) travel books. Ludo she keeps in the dark about his patrimony, feeding him instead new languages at the rate of one or two a year, and, when an effort to put him in school with others his age wreaks havoc on the class, she resumes responsibility for his education, which, not surprisingly, relies heavily on Kurosawa’s film. As Ludo grows up, however, he will not be denied knowledge of his father, and sniffs him out—only to be as disappointed with him as his mother is. Hopes of happiness with the genuine article having been dashed, Ludo moves on to ideal candidates, and approaches a succession of geniuses, each time with a claim of being the man’s son. While these efforts are enlightening, they are also futile—and in one case tragic—until Ludo finds his match in one who knows the dialogue of Seven Samurai almost as well as he does.
Unabashedly over the top at times but, still, a saga that gives rise to as much amusement as it does sober reflection. A promising start, indeed.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7868-6668-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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