A highly imaginative, if occasionally muddled, tale about the effects of a plague.
A debut novel features a rabbi and a journalist who embark on an exotic journey.
At the beginning of this story set in 2016, happy, prosperous freelance journalist Ron Levine is fresh from a Miami Beach morning swim (and a brief encounter with a hammerhead shark). Running some errands for his wife prior to a dinner with their friends the Applebaums and the possible landfall of Hurricane Bessie, he encounters Rabbi Mandelson in a parking lot. The two take shelter from a thunderstorm in Ron’s car, where the rabbi offers him a chance to accompany him and a crew as they navigate the jungles of Peru in search of “a lost tribe of Israel.” The rabbi is certain the tribe exists, hidden in the forest. During the expedition, in a classic comic move on Mendel’s part, the team’s biblical scholar, Rabbi Karpadah, in an excess of in-the-jungle enthusiasm, kisses a tree frog. The viral infection that results quickly sweeps the world. When Rabbi Mandelson and Ron meet again two years later in the book’s second part, the whole tone of the narrative has changed accordingly. This opens up avenues for a dramatic increase in the unpredictable and the downright weird. The inventive novel’s second half centers on the bizarre adventures of the Levines and the Applebaums. Readers who were startled by the touches of magical realism in the story’s first section will be swamped by it in the second part. The author handles the integration of both halves very well, although there are annoying stylistic tics scattered throughout the work. Mendel is prone to larding scenes with extraneous details, and the character interactions are sometimes startlingly unrealistic. The combined effect has the strengths and weaknesses of most trippy fiction. Both the real world and the surreal realms sometimes end up feeling less than convincing.
A highly imaginative, if occasionally muddled, tale about the effects of a plague.Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9970976-3-4
Page Count: 379
Publisher: Sunbridge Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An action-packed, brightly detailed historical novel not much hampered by its thinly characterized central figure.
A free-spirited woman forges a career as a writer and journalist, risking scandal and war zones to follow her heart.
Allende’s latest opens in San Francisco in 1873, introducing Emilia at age 7, the illegitimate daughter of Molly Walsh, who, as a novice nun, was seduced and abandoned by wealthy Chilean Gonzalo Andrés del Valle. Molly goes on to a successful marriage, Emilia grows up with a loving stepfather, and at 17 she begins writing, then publishing, sensational dime novels under the pseudonym Brandon J. Price. By 23, she’s a journalist with a column in The Daily Examiner, though still forced to hide her gender behind her pen name. Rule breaking is in her nature, and while she accepts, for now, lower pay than men, she decides on a trip to New York to take a lover and learns to control her own contraception. Later, finally writing under her own name, she’s commissioned to go to Chile and cover its civil war from a human angle, accompanied by colleague and friend Eric Whelan, whose focus is the military aspect. Chilean revolutionary politics make for less sprightly reading, but Emilia’s individual encounters with members of high and low society lend atmosphere. These include the president, a great aunt, and eventually her father—now alone, regretful, and mortally ill. Although he disapproves of working women, the two share a “desire to see the world and experience everything intensely,” and when he offers to recognize Emilia as his legitimate child, she accepts. Now the story gathers pace, with Emilia—always and predictably the rebel—witnessing the horrors of battle, discovering that she and Eric are in love, and getting arrested. Not quite plausibly, she instigates a further sequence of impulsive moves before the story is permitted to conclude.
An action-packed, brightly detailed historical novel not much hampered by its thinly characterized central figure.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593975091
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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