Despite a few hiccups, an attention-grabbing mystery with a quirky cast of characters in a steamy Southern setting.
Money and power lie at the root of this murder mystery as a tangled web of characters seeks to protect a young Gullah child.
Jonah Washington is a victim of neglect and abuse in the broken foster-care system of Beaufort, S.C. After he narrowly escapes a deadly beating from his foster mother, Jonah is taken in by social worker Coral Peters and her daughter Hannah. Determined to right the wrongs done to Jonah, Coral enlists the assistance of her friend, child psychologist Jadah Jimysee, and unknowingly kicks off a surprising chain of events. Suddenly, everyone is interested in Jonah’s whereabouts and well being, from the homeless man on the corner to the wealthiest family in Beaufort. A protective circle forms around Jonah and includes the handsome and unpredictable Jack Claybourn, a man who knew Jonah’s parents and is determined to solve the mystery of their deaths and protect their son at all costs. Murders stack up as various characters, battling their own demons and defeats, are caught up in family politics, societal pressures, and a string of unsolved deaths and violent attacks. Jonah and Jadah are tied to the Gullah community and come alive through Dinsmoor’s dialogue and use of the Gullah language. Other characters, such as Hank, a Shakespeare-spouting homeless man, are uniquely interesting and introduce a lighthearted aspect to a novel that spends much of its time focused on death, violence and abuse. However, Dinsmoor is overly ambitious; the abundance of characters can be unwieldy. Many of the intriguing secondary characters remain underdeveloped, as Dinsmoor glosses their motivations and potential. Alternately, Coral and Jack receive ample time, as the narrative of their potential relationship runs parallel to the story of Jonah and the murders. Yet Jack appears to be a masochistic drunk who can be unbalanced, violent and verbally abusive. The anger and seething resentment that frequently underlie his interactions with Coral give one pause, as if their romance is being shoehorned into a story that clearly isn’t meant to be a fairy tale.
Despite a few hiccups, an attention-grabbing mystery with a quirky cast of characters in a steamy Southern setting.Pub Date: July 11, 2012
ISBN: 9781477505199
Page Count: 448
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
In this tender and capacious story, love and tragedy mingle along the river and into the world.
The Red River of the North cuts a vivid track through the hardscrabble lives that anchor Erdrich’s surpassing North Dakota fiction.
This deft, almost winsome novel begins at night, with Crystal Frechette, a trucker. She’s hauling sugar beets and wearing “a lucky hat knitted by her daughter,” Kismet Poe. Her headlights are “peacefully cutting radiant holes in the blackness” when she glimpses a mountain lion vault across the road. It’s a sign, but of what? Kismet, finishing high school, is edgy, furious, and bored. Both Gary Geist, her school’s quarterback, and Hugo Dumach, a nerdy home-schooler, fixate on her as the angel destined to slay their wildly divergent demons. This nutty love triangle kickstarts the plot; Kismet, in a futile stab at avoiding teen marriage, slips from a bridge into the cold Red River, floating downstream until she’s rescued. But true love here is the kind between mother and daughter. This pair, beset by the 2008 economic meltdown, proves expert in “getting trapped but at least not giving up.” Around them, a recent, communal catastrophe on the frozen river stays murky through three-quarters of the story. In counterpoint, the town’s daffy book club dissects Eat Pray Love and The Road, each session blooming into comic set pieces. Erdrich reaches for some of her fictional staples: a waitressing gig, multiple viewpoints, and, always, mixed-heritage Native people trying to grasp and transmit that heritage. Her writing feels both effortless and wise. She notes a boy’s “shy armpits” and how a soundproofed house can feel “inhuman, maybe even violent.” Even if a minor character, the Catholic priest, bogs down in caricature, Erdrich has few equals in braiding landscape and sky into the marrow of her characters. Her poet’s origins are in full force as she folds in the sickening damage of fracking and pesticide-dependent agriculture, right alongside the sprouts of resistance.
In this tender and capacious story, love and tragedy mingle along the river and into the world.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780063277052
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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