Look for a film version soon, but don’t deny yourself the pleasure of reading the book. Kit’s Law is a charmer.
This appealing first novel, set in coastal Newfoundland and certain to be compared to E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, was published to widespread acclaim in its author’s native Canada in 1999.
The story is set in the “outport” of Fox’s Cove, near Haire’s Hollow, and focuses on the close familial relationship that binds together its fatherless narrator, adolescent Kit, her mentally retarded (and “wild”) mother Josie, and feisty Lizzy, Kit’s grandmother, who keeps the fragile family together, fending off the loudly proclaimed disapproval of most of the Pitmans’ neighbors. When Lizzy dies unexpectedly, a delegation led by haughty Mrs. Ropson, wife of the fire-breathing local minister, tries to have mother and daughter committed to an asylum and an orphanage, respectively. Kit is a heroine whom we immediately warm to (her phlegmatic housecat Pirate is an almost equally companionable character)—and Morrissey severely tests her character’s wits and survival skills as pressure mounts from “respectable” souls; minister’s son Sid befriends the Pitmans (and captures Kit’s unruly heart); a murder stuns the community; and the identity of Kit’s father—one of the many villagers who’d had their way with the impulsive Josie, his identity hitherto known only to kindly Doc Hodgins—may at last be revealed. It all sounds corny, but it isn’t—despite many unmistakable echoes of other books, including Wuthering Heights (oddly), New Zealander Keri Hulme’s Booker-winner, The Bone People, To Kill a Mockingbird, and any number of Dickens novels (the creepy rapist and killer known as Shine, in fact, bears more than a passing resemblance to Oliver Twist’s gloriously depraved Bill Sykes). No matter: Morrissey’s warmth and genuinely respectful affection for her characters, Kit’s flinty, vigorous voice, and dialogue so salty it could pit aluminum are more than compensatory virtues.
Look for a film version soon, but don’t deny yourself the pleasure of reading the book. Kit’s Law is a charmer.Pub Date: May 3, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-10927-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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