A rambling family tale with an underlying message extolling the virtues of acceptance and gratitude.
A debut fictional autobiography focuses on an African American woman who searches her ancestry and uncovers an identity-shaking, decades-old secret.
Raised in Virginia, the product of an extraordinarily dysfunctional family, 47-year-old Maria Butler decides to do some research into her paternal lineage. Her father, Ronald Butler, has long been out of her life so she turns to the internet. Over the years, she has already assembled considerable information about her mother’s side of the family. She learned her older “sister,” Angela, is actually her cousin. Maria’s mother, Darlene, was coerced by her own mom into raising her half sister’s baby, Angela, to “spare Myrtle the embarrassment of having a child out of wedlock with her first cousin, Ronald.” Yes, the same Ronald that married Maria’s mother. The unsavory trail down the Butler line proves less than comforting—Maria turns up a “series of police reports, death certificates filled with homicides, and police records with long prison sentences.” But when she sends her DNA to the company 23andMe, she finds a link to a Texas Vietnam War hero, Samuel Anthony “Tony” Purcell. It turns out that Tony, not Ronald, is her biological father. Her given name was “Francis Marie Purcell.” She also discovers she has an older brother, Brice, who was left in Texas when her mother returned to Virginia with 3-year-old Maria. With the major reveals disclosed up front, Baxter’s narrative lacks dramatic tension. Even for fiction, the tale crosses the line of credulity. The combination of Maria’s mother’s family (the Sampsons) and the wealthy, prolific Purcells, plus the multiple, intertwined relationships among siblings, half siblings, and more, will leave readers scrambling to keep track of the over-packed cast. Adding to the confusion, the author rarely provides clear timelines, frequently jumping back and forth between present-day accounts and backstories. Still, the articulate, conversational prose is engaging and the book ends on a high note, with Maria asserting: “I would…learn…invaluable lessons about forgiveness and respect” and “I would learn how to build and support relationships.”
A rambling family tale with an underlying message extolling the virtues of acceptance and gratitude.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-72831-041-1
Page Count: 122
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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