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
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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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