Set in Ethiopia in the 1950s, Ambau’s moving tale is a lively coming-of-age story with merging themes of forgiveness and redemption.
Desta’s early years are filled with longing—to be loved more fully by his family and to understand why he is so often the object of his brothers’ torment. He longs, too, for the day he will climb the mountain beyond his home to touch the sky and gather the clouds in his hands. For several years, he plans what he’ll take on his journey, but he is too young to make the trek alone, and his sisters and mother repeatedly fall back on their promises to accompany him. On the eve of Desta’s seventh birthday and his rite of passage into adulthood, his father, Abraham, reveals the duties that will now be expected of him; aside from his new grown-up responsibilities of tending animals and helping with harvests, Desta and his niece, Astair, have been tasked with contacting the spirits—with the assistance of a sorcerer, Deb’tera Tayé—to ask for help in resolving his sister Saba’s inability to conceive and carry a son to term. Desta’s real troubles begin when a cloudlike man appears to him during the spiritual ceremony, providing instructions for Abraham and his family that will further anger Desta’s brothers and turn them even more vehemently against him. To make matters worse, many in the community laugh at the boy and scorn him for what they suspect are wild imaginings. Ambau’s deft descriptions of spiritual happenings and ancient blessings transport the reader to another time and place that almost seamlessly alternates between the magical world of the cloud man—“stippled with dots and tinged with gold”—and the despairing reality of a little boy who suffers brutal beatings at the hands of those he loves. Readers may wonder what caused the abrupt shift in Abraham’s character when he whips the boy mercilessly, since the author has shown us a gentle and compassionate father to this point. One might also wonder at the quickness with which young Desta puts the affair behind him, as he later does again when slighted by his father at a family feast. Throughout, Ambau shows us a boy who is perhaps unusually resilient and abundantly forgiving of his father, yet real enough to be mightily challenged in his attempts to forgive his bullying brothers. Desta’s strength and tenacity in this first volume will entice many readers to eagerly anticipate the next installment of the young boy’s journey and the continuation of his family’s saga.
Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2010
ISBN: 978-1884459016
Page Count: 446
Publisher: Falcon Press International
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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