Overdrawn yet readable portrait of collective advocacy and friendship at work, spearheaded by a valiant, relatable...
Former women’s shelter counselor Picco, in her debut, traces the intertwining business and personal lives of an altruistic media consultancy executive.
Beck Carnell, a journalist-turned-CEO of media consultancy Social Good, becomes inspired by her agency’s latest media campaign, which involves carefully publicizing a dispute between the local Ontario Teachers’ Union and the Canadian government’s initiative to freeze wages and restrict the union from exercising its right to strike for three years. The intricate strategizing comes from several of Social Good’s best employees, including Yvonne Precipa, an overachieving media relations specialist, and Asmi, an Indian woman growing impatient with her husband Jai’s indifference toward revealing to his parents that they’d been married in secret. Another specialist, Todd Purcell, busies himself with an aggressive breast cancer campaign while facing political red tape and a precarious past. Adding to the mix is persnickety, rogue bookkeeper Tilda Grubbs, who has embezzled thousands and disappeared. Yvonne and Asmi’s storylines are introduced and resolved somewhat simplistically, whereas Beck’s character gets deeper development, particularly with remembrances of her childhood being regaled with her grandfather’s stories of Newfoundland, her high school days, and her impulsive marriage to former husband Anthony, whom she met while a college student. Beck struggles to provide emotional support for her two grown children while navigating their bitter animosity toward their father, and she aids best friend Samantha Reed, who’s learned of a devastating cancer diagnosis. While affable and devoid of the unsavory elements alluded to by the book’s title, Picco’s contemporary narrative suffers from a lack of plot as well as a surfeit of superfluous exposition. Such detail does little to heighten the narrative tension, particularly in a novel over 400 pages long. Nevertheless, the book’s resilient cast will generate compassion as its characters confront the social and political challenges facing teachers and charitable organizations.
Overdrawn yet readable portrait of collective advocacy and friendship at work, spearheaded by a valiant, relatable protagonist.Pub Date: July 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-7003-0
Page Count: 318
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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