Politically engaged characters experience life after apartheid in Van Wyk’s debut novel.
Van Wyk, who grew up in South Africa, firmly grasps the country’s history. The novel seems to waver between fiction and nonfiction and follows two families: One is black and one white, and they have worked side by side for generations on the farm Vergenoeg. Not far into the novel, 65-year-old Andries Mokwebo, a black farmhand, takes legal action against his white employer, Fanie Botha, for rights to the farm. The legal action comes at a time when the country is readily redistributing white-owned farmland to blacks. Andries wants the land so he can secure his teenage son Sephiwe’s financial future, yet he suspects that his actions are unfair to his employer, a good man. Sephiwe, one of the novel’s most believable characters, can understand the moral complexities with which his father and Fanie are grappling, but he’s more interested in his own intellectual curiosities (he muses, “the mystery surrounding the motion of the heavenly bodies serene in its being”) than in his father’s problems. The second narrative arc is about a love affair between a young black, female farmhand, Nandi, and her employer’s son, Koos. Both stories hold interest—at least at first—but the novel stagnates due to long and too frequent exchanges about politics, which are forced and inauthentic. From the relatively uneducated Andries, readers see dialogue like this: “For us all to survive in South Africa and for that matter in Africa, the problems we are faced with must become our collective national challenge. That is the only route for us to take, to save Africa, our fatherland.” Does anybody really talk like this to other family members around the dinner table? The story also often lacks spontaneity because Van Wyk tells too much and shows too little. A well-thought-out narrative made richer by Van Wyk’s opinions and knowledge and poorer by one-dimensional characters and a predictable plot.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-1483693361
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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