An elegantly written first novel by Ladd, director of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, offers a feminist journey toward self-discovery, drawing its strength from its unique insight into the Pan-African consciousness of the post-colonial era. Sarah Stewart, a child of the black bourgeoisie, has dreamed of Senegal ever since her uncle George brought back tales of African adventure in her youth. After Wellesley, and marriage to a suitable Dartmouth grad, Sarah begins her graduate studies at Harvard, where she pursues her interest in Francophone African writers, particularly Ibrahim Mangane, whom she visits in the summer of 1963. With her supposedly perfect marriage falling apart, Sarah becomes colleague and muse to Mangane, whose wife, Mariama, welcomes her into their childless family. Sarah admires more than Ibrahim's ``liberated cultural consciousness''; she believes that she has at last discovered her ``authentic self'' in Senegal. Back in Cambridge, Sarah divorces, finishes her degree, begins teaching at Boston University but is soon summoned back to Africa by Ibrahim. After Mariama's death in childbirth, Sarah marries Ibrahim and leads the fairy-tale life of an African princess: She collaborates with Ibrahim on his work, bears him another son, and watches as her husband's reputation grows, helped by her book about his work. Sarah's incipient feminism, however, makes her increasingly restive, and she begins to pursue her own work with the poor women of Africa. Ibrahim wins the Nobel Prize, but their happiness is short lived—his older son, now an Islamic fundamentalist who believes that his father's work is not in the best interests of the faith, dies with Ibrahim when a bomb he has planted explodes. Sarah finds solace in her other son, and in her creation of a Pan-African center for women's issues. Vivid, stylish, but too breathless in its uncritical political views: Ladd's debut is intermittently persuasive but seems at times uncomfortably like Afrocentric chic with a heavy dollop of conventional romance.
Pub Date: Aug. 2, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80410-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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