Long-time fans, especially those familiar with the Hand clan (previously introduced in Net of Jewels, 1992; I Cannot Get You Close Enough, 1990; The Anna Papers, 1988), will feel right at home with Gilchrist's latest meditation on love, sex, and family. Olivia de Haviland Hand, daughter of Daniel, a wealthy North Carolinian, decides to spend the summer after her freshman year in college with her maternal grandparents, who raised her. (Her mother, a Cherokee from Oklahoma, died in childbirth.) Olivia (Via) goes to Oklahoma and ends up reconnecting with her high school sweetheart, Bobby. When he asks her to marry him, she is forced to examine her feelings about love, sex, marriage, and motherhood. Via's 20-year-old half-sister, Jessie, is in New Orleans awaiting the birth of her first child by her cousin/husband, King, who is himself trying to grow quickly into responsible fatherhood. Via and Jessie's Aunt Helen (Daniel's sister) has left her husband and kids to pursue happiness in Boston with Irish poet Mike, whom she met after the suicide of her sister, Anna, fatally ill with cancer. Helen is trying to reconcile with her kids without giving up her new life, at the same time pressuring her brother Daniel to turn over a new leaf. Daniel, meanwhile, is languishing in Carolina deep in mid-life crisis, drinking the summer away, missing his daughters, ignoring his current lover, Margaret, until eventually he, too, sees the ``light'' of love and the possibility of a different future. Starcarbon is soap at its most elegant. Sex as life force comes through at every turn. Yet the novel's lyricism and Gilchrist's distinctive, flowing voice keeps one engaged throughout, even when the various storylines begin to lag in interest.
Pub Date: April 26, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-31327-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
IN THE NEWS
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.
Walker (In Love and Trouble, Meridian) has set herself the task of an epistolary novel—and she scores strongly with it.
The time is in the Thirties; a young, black, Southern woman named Celie is the primary correspondent (God being her usual addressee); and the life described in her letters is one of almost impossible grimness. While young, Celie is raped by a stepfather. (Even worse, she believes him to be her real father.) She's made to bear two children that are then taken away from her. She's married off without her consent to an older man, Albert, who'd rather have Celie's sister Nettie—and, by sacrificing her body to Albert without love or feeling, Celie saves her sister, making it possible for her to escape: soon Nettle goes to Africa to work as a Christian missionary. Eventually, then, halfway through the book, as Celie's sub-literate dialect letters to God continue to mount (eventually achieving the naturalness and intensity of music, equal in beauty to Eudora Welty's early dialect stories), letters from Nettie in Africa begin to arrive. But Celie doesn't see them—because Albert holds them back from her. And it's only when Celie finds an unlikely redeemer—Albert's blues-singer lover Shug Avery—that her isolation ends: Shug takes Celie under her wing, becomes Celie's lover as well as Albert's; Shug's strength and expansiveness and wisdom finally free up Nettie's letters—thus granting poor Celie a tangible life in the now (Shug's love, encouragement) as well as a family life, a past (Nettie's letters). Walker fashions this book beautifully—with each of Celie's letters slowly adding to her independence (the implicit feminism won't surprise Walker's readers), with each letter deepening the rich, almost folk-tale-ish sense of story here. And, like an inverted pyramid, the novel thus builds itself up broadeningly while balanced on the frailest imaginable single point: the indestructibility—and battered-ness—of love.
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.Pub Date: June 28, 1982
ISBN: 0151191549
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
PLB 0-688-13166-2 King Midas And The Golden Touch ($16.00; PLB $15.63; Apr.; 32 pp.; 0-688-13165-4; PLB 0-688-13166-2): The familiar tale of King Midas gets the golden touch in the hands of Craft and Craft (Cupid and Psyche, 1996). The author takes her inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s retelling, capturing the essence of the tale with the use of pithy dialogue and colorful description. Enchanting in their own right, the illustrations summon the Middle Ages as a setting, and incorporate colors so lavish that when they are lost to the uniform gold spurred by King Midas’s touch, the point of the story is further burnished. (Picture book. 7-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-13165-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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