Vividly imagined and well-researched, but rendered in miscalculated tones.
A 45-year-old wife and mother chronicles the Donner Party debacle along the Oregon Trail.
The horrific circumstances of the party’s snowbound months in the Sierra Nevadas during the winter of 1846-47 are well known, but many specifics, including those surrounding the notorious incidents of cannibalism, remain enduring mysteries. Burton (Heartbreak Hotel, 1999, etc.) sets out to imagine and reconstruct those awful last months and to convey them in the voice of someone who was there: Tamsen Donner, who attempted to protect her injured husband George and her five young daughters under inconceivable duress. Told mainly in unsent letters to her sister, Tamsen’s narrative is harrowingly matter-of-fact as she records the ever-rising death toll in the original group of 87 pioneers, details the ever-increasing privations and recounts the ever-more-desperate measures needed to survive. The novel’s strength lies in its evocation of domestic details, but the fiercely loyal marital and maternal love at the book’s heart might have tugged the heartstrings more if the author had been able to resist sentimental anachronistic flourishes. For example, Tamsen, a proto-feminist who has the minister leave “obey” out of her wedding vows, expresses ideas about and sympathy for Native Americans that seem more appropriate to 2010 than to 1846. As a result, the book feels rigged and partisan, a hagiography that happens to be written in first person.
Vividly imagined and well-researched, but rendered in miscalculated tones.Pub Date: March 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4013-4101-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Strebor/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.
A novel of sharply drawn character studies immersed in more than 250 hard, transformative years in the African-American diaspora.
Gyasi’s debut novel opens in the mid-1700s in what is now Ghana, as tribal rivalries are exploited by British and Dutch colonists and slave traders. The daughter of one tribal leader marries a British man for financial expediency, then learns that the “castle” he governs is a holding dungeon for slaves. (When she asks what’s held there, she’s told “cargo.”) The narrative soon alternates chapters between the Ghanans and their American descendants up through the present day. On either side of the Atlantic, the tale is often one of racism, degradation, and loss: a slave on an Alabama plantation is whipped “until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby”; a freedman in Baltimore fears being sent back South with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; a Ghanan woman is driven mad from the abuse of a missionary and her husband’s injury in a tribal war; a woman in Harlem is increasingly distanced from (and then humiliated by) her husband, who passes as white. Gyasi is a deeply empathetic writer, and each of the novel’s 14 chapters is a savvy character portrait that reveals the impact of racism from multiple perspectives. It lacks the sweep that its premise implies, though: while the characters share a bloodline, and a gold-flecked stone appears throughout the book as a symbolic connector, the novel is more a well-made linked story collection than a complex epic. Yet Gyasi plainly has the talent to pull that off: “I will be my own nation,” one woman tells a British suitor early on, and the author understands both the necessity of that defiance and how hard it is to follow through on it.
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94713-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
Part of Hoffman's great talent is her wonderful ability to sift some magic into unlikely places, such as a latter-day Levittown (Seventh Heaven, 1990) or a community of divorcÇes in Florida (Turtle Moon, 1992). But in her 11th novel, a tale of love and life in New England, it feels as if the lid flew off the jar of magic—it blinds you with fairy dust. Sally and Gillian Owens are orphaned sisters, only 13 months apart, but such opposites in appearance and temperament that they're dubbed ``Day and Night'' by the two old aunts who are raising them. Sally is steady, Gillian is jittery, and each is wary, in her own way, about the frightening pull of love. They've seen the evidence for themselves in the besotted behavior of the women who call on the two aunts for charms and potions to help them with their love lives. The aunts grow herbs, make mysterious brews, and have a houseful of—what else?—black cats. The two girls grow up to flee (in opposite directions) from the aunts, the house, and the Massachusetts town where they've long been shunned by their superstitious schoolmates. What they can't escape is magic, which follows them, sometimes in a particularly malevolent form. And, ultimately, no matter how hard they dodge it, they have to recognize that love always catches up with you. As always, Hoffman's writing has plenty of power. Her best sentences are like incantations—they won't let you get away. But it's just too hard to believe the magic here, maybe because it's not so much practical magic as it is predictable magic, with its crones and bubbling cauldrons and hearts of animals pierced with pins. Sally and Gillian are appealing characters, but, finally, their story seems as murky as one of the aunts' potions—and just as hard to swallow. Too much hocus-pocus, not enough focus. (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: June 14, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14055-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK TO SCREEN
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