Through her highly moral and socially responsible characters, a 19th-century African-American writer presents a broad, lively range of political and personal views about being treated as America's second-class citizens. These three novels, originally serialized in the mid-to-late- 1800s in Christian Recorder (the journal of the African Methodist Episcopal Church), were recently rediscovered by editor Foster (Literature/Univ. of California, San Diego) while doing research on Harper. The eponymous heroine of Minnie's Sacrifice is a young woman of mixed race spirited away from the South and raised in the North by a gentle, loving Quaker couple. Her true racial heritage is kept from her until one day her escaped slave mother surprises her on the street. Minnie marries Louis, who has also been ignorant of his mixed race parentage; after the war they bravely live in the South to work for the personal and economic uplifting and empowerment of their race—until tragedy strikes. Sowing and Reaping is a paean to the virtues of avoiding the decadence of drink; it uses contrasting pairs of friends—frivolous Jeanette and Charles, steady Belle and Paul—to tell a story of temperance and self-destruction. In Trial and Triumph, Annette Harcourt moves through a lonely childhood and awkward adolescence to become a beloved teacher and poet in her community, finding love only after years of hard work and sacrifice. Foster has ably edited and introduced the novels, putting in context melodramatic plots and highly stylized language that may seem dated or off-putting to some readers. An important addition to 19th-century American literature, addressing weighty questions of race, community, and citizenship that are still being posed today.
Pub Date: June 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-8070-8332-1
Page Count: 329
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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