bookshelf

MOSQUITO

Name: MOSQUITO
Author: Gayl Jones
ISBN: 0-8070-8346-1

by Gayl Jones ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 25, 1999

bookshelf

A recent confrontation with police that ended in the suicide of Jones’s husband and her own hospitalization for what seemed a nervous breakdown understandably grabbed headlines. But the real news is that the author of the Corregidora (1975) and Eva’s Man (1976) is once again—in fact, since last year’s NBA-nominated The Healing—publishing vivid and challenging fiction grounded in African-American themes. Her latest is arguably both something more and something less than a novel, but it’s a fascinating story: the first-person narrative of black independent truck-driver Sojourner Nadine Jane Johnson (a.k.a. “Mosquito”). A native Kentuckian whose regular route runs through southern Texas, Nadine strikes up a friendship with the sisterly, mentoring Delgadina, a determinedly self-educated bartender-waitress, and gradually becomes involved with the “new underground railroad” transporting Mexican immigrants—and eventually with a radical activist with whose help she forms the worker-owned Mosquito Trucking Company. Nothing much more really happens in a “novel” composed of long, rich conversations and exchanges of letters, thanks to which Nadine reinvents herself while learning the histories of her own and other “second-class” culture struggles. It’s a discursive, free-form dramatization of the raising of a consciousness, including material derived from Buddhist doctrine, Native American “trickster” tales, Mexico’s colonial history, Shakespeare’s Othello, and numerous other transmogrified sources and influences. The book has its longueurs, but when Jones keeps throwing at you the adventures of Nadine’s childhood friend “Monkey Bread” as “personal assistant” to a Hollywood star, the “prophetic” and “mystical” writings of pseudonymous savant “Electra,” the militantly Pan-African “Daughters of Nzingha,” and much more (even a play written by the author’s mother), it’s hard not to be swept along by the sassy rhetorical momentum. Early on, Nadine imagines “a true jazz story, where the peoples that listen can just enter the story and start telling it theyselves while they’s reading.” Mosquito is such a story.

Pub Date: Jan. 25, 1999

ISBN: 0-8070-8346-1

Page Count: 736

Publisher: Beacon Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE UNICORN WOMAN
by Gayl Jones

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BIRDCATCHER
by Gayl Jones

- BOOK REVIEW
SONG FOR ALMEYDA & SONG FOR ANNINHO
by Gayl Jones

bookshelf

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

bookshelf

A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

- SEEN & HEARD
The Snowy Day Is NYC Library’s Most Popular Book

- SEEN & HEARD
ALA Releases List of 2020’s Most Challenged Books

- SEEN & HEARD
NYT Readers Voting on Best Book of Past 125 Years

bookshelf

LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

bookshelf

This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.