A psychologically astute, skillful, engrossing and satisfying novel.
A Detroit boy is sent to stay with his grandparents in rural 1950s Appalachia in this debut literary novel with touches of magical realism.
Nine-year-old Orbie Ray is “a handful” according to his stepfather, Victor. That’s why he has to stay with his grandparents in Kentucky while the rest of the family drives down to Florida, where Victor has a job opportunity. Everything in Harlan’s Crossroads is so different from Detroit—not just the bluegrass and tobacco farms, but also the race relations. Orbie grew up believing that “colored” kids jumped you in the schoolyard and that a black man caused the accident that killed his father. However, in Kentucky, he notices that white folks are often scarier—such as Old Man Harlan, who charges too much at his store, or Bird Pruitt, Harlan’s disturbing hunchback cousin. He also meets Moses Mashbone, a half Choctaw, half black snake handler and medicine man who saved Granpaw’s life; as a result, Granny won’t allow Orbie to say the N-word. Orbie can’t find anyone to play with, so he overcomes his fears and makes friends with Willis, a “little colored boy Moses takes care of.” Willis has a stutter and clubfoot, but he also sings and draws pictures. The story of how Victor courted Orbie’s mother unfolds in flashback, alternating with scenes of Orbie’s story, as he finds himself confronting powerful forces—race, family, nature and even something supernatural. In his debut novel, Owens captures his characters’ folksy Appalachian diction without overdoing it and subtly reveals character through dialogue and description. He also renders a child’s viewpoint with great psychological sensitivity: “I didn’t like the way [Victor] was all the time trying to be on my mind. It was too close together somehow—like when Momma started talking about Jesus and wouldn’t shut up.” Moses and Willis are sometimes overly idealized, and readers may wish that the novel better explored the downsides of snake-handling churches. Overall, however, readers will find this an impressive debut.
A psychologically astute, skillful, engrossing and satisfying novel.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475084498
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Blind Sight Publications
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Rather than settle for a coming-of-age or travails-of-immigrants story, Hosseini has folded them both into this searing...
Here’s a real find: a striking debut from an Afghan now living in the US. His passionate story of betrayal and redemption is framed by Afghanistan’s tragic recent past.
Moving back and forth between Afghanistan and California, and spanning almost 40 years, the story begins in Afghanistan in the tranquil 1960s. Our protagonist Amir is a child in Kabul. The most important people in his life are Baba and Hassan. Father Baba is a wealthy Pashtun merchant, a larger-than-life figure, fretting over his bookish weakling of a son (the mother died giving birth); Hassan is his sweet-natured playmate, son of their servant Ali and a Hazara. Pashtuns have always dominated and ridiculed Hazaras, so Amir can’t help teasing Hassan, even though the Hazara staunchly defends him against neighborhood bullies like the “sociopath” Assef. The day, in 1975, when 12-year-old Amir wins the annual kite-fighting tournament is the best and worst of his young life. He bonds with Baba at last but deserts Hassan when the latter is raped by Assef. And it gets worse. With the still-loyal Hassan a constant reminder of his guilt, Amir makes life impossible for him and Ali, ultimately forcing them to leave town. Fast forward to the Russian occupation, flight to America, life in the Afghan exile community in the Bay Area. Amir becomes a writer and marries a beautiful Afghan; Baba dies of cancer. Then, in 2001, the past comes roaring back. Rahim, Baba’s old business partner who knows all about Amir’s transgressions, calls from Pakistan. Hassan has been executed by the Taliban; his son, Sohrab, must be rescued. Will Amir wipe the slate clean? So he returns to the hell of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and reclaims Sohrab from a Taliban leader (none other than Assef) after a terrifying showdown. Amir brings the traumatized child back to California and a bittersweet ending.
Rather than settle for a coming-of-age or travails-of-immigrants story, Hosseini has folded them both into this searing spectacle of hard-won personal salvation. All this, and a rich slice of Afghan culture too: irresistible.Pub Date: June 2, 2003
ISBN: 1-57322-245-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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