An engaging, if uneven, look at the problems of rural Alaska through the eyes of a teen.
An Alaska teenager sorts out her complicated family and campaigns for girls’ self-esteem and independence.
In this debut contemporary novel, Sobey introduces 17-year-old Crystal M. Rose (named, like her younger brother, JD, for one of her parents’ preferred substances), who writes songs in response to the drug use, objectification of girls, and general malaise she sees among her peers in small-town Alaska. With the help of her best friend, Kato, who runs his own blog advocating for the Native community, Crystal launches the book’s titular endeavor to share her songs with a wider audience. (The lyrics are featured in the novel’s text, and a companion website, thewarblog.com, includes recordings.) The songs draw a mixture of scorn and support from her classmates and attention from politicians and the broader community, including Crystal and JD’s long-absent father, who poses a threat to his children. After Crystal and her loved ones relocate to Kato’s coastal village when their house is destroyed, she begins communicating with a blog commenter, setting in motion further family and community drama and reconciliation. Sobey, a resident of rural Alaska, portrays Crystal’s world with an insider’s perspective, vividly depicting the environment and traditions—the protagonist participates in a whale harvest—while also presenting a community nearly destroyed by drugs, alcohol (JD was named for Jack Daniel’s), and violence. The complex story of Crystal’s relatives and the lies they tell is well-executed, and Sobey keeps the many layers of the narrative balanced. But while Crystal’s passionate defense of girls who exist to satisfy boys’ desires is genuine, her enthusiasm often becomes judgmental (“How did your daughter turn into a drug addict?” she asks her grandparents; she tells a pregnant teen: “You’re going to have to teach her to not make the same mistakes”). And the protagonist’s interpretation of problems in the Native community (“Deep down, they believed their culture to be less….Somehow they needed to purge themselves and find a better path”) is off-putting.
An engaging, if uneven, look at the problems of rural Alaska through the eyes of a teen.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68433-147-5
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An extremely powerful story of a young Southern Negro, from his late high school days through three years of college to his life in Harlem.
His early training prepared him for a life of humility before white men, but through injustices- large and small, he came to realize that he was an "invisible man". People saw in him only a reflection of their preconceived ideas of what he was, denied his individuality, and ultimately did not see him at all. This theme, which has implications far beyond the obvious racial parallel, is skillfully handled. The incidents of the story are wholly absorbing. The boy's dismissal from college because of an innocent mistake, his shocked reaction to the anonymity of the North and to Harlem, his nightmare experiences on a one-day job in a paint factory and in the hospital, his lightning success as the Harlem leader of a communistic organization known as the Brotherhood, his involvement in black versus white and black versus black clashes and his disillusion and understanding of his invisibility- all climax naturally in scenes of violence and riot, followed by a retreat which is both literal and figurative. Parts of this experience may have been told before, but never with such freshness, intensity and power.
This is Ellison's first novel, but he has complete control of his story and his style. Watch it.
Pub Date: April 7, 1952
ISBN: 0679732764
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1952
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Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the...
Hannah’s sequel to Firefly Lane (2008) demonstrates that those who ignore family history are often condemned to repeat it.
When we last left Kate and Tully, the best friends portrayed in Firefly Lane, the friendship was on rocky ground. Now Kate has died of cancer, and Tully, whose once-stellar TV talk show career is in free fall, is wracked with guilt over her failure to be there for Kate until her very last days. Kate’s death has cemented the distrust between her husband, Johnny, and daughter Marah, who expresses her grief by cutting herself and dropping out of college to hang out with goth poet Paxton. Told mostly in flashbacks by Tully, Johnny, Marah and Tully’s long-estranged mother, Dorothy, aka Cloud, the story piles up disasters like the derailment of a high-speed train. Increasingly addicted to prescription sedatives and alcohol, Tully crashes her car and now hovers near death, attended by Kate’s spirit, as the other characters gather to see what their shortsightedness has wrought. We learn that Tully had tried to parent Marah after her father no longer could. Her hard-drinking decline was triggered by Johnny’s anger at her for keeping Marah and Paxton’s liaison secret. Johnny realizes that he only exacerbated Marah’s depression by uprooting the family from their Seattle home. Unexpectedly, Cloud, who rebuffed Tully’s every attempt to reconcile, also appears at her daughter’s bedside. Sixty-nine years old and finally sober, Cloud details for the first time the abusive childhood, complete with commitments to mental hospitals and electroshock treatments, that led to her life as a junkie lowlife and punching bag for trailer-trash men. Although powerful, Cloud’s largely peripheral story deflects focus away from the main conflict, as if Hannah was loath to tackle the intractable thicket in which she mired her main characters.
Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the pages turning even as readers begin to resent being drawn into this masochistic morass.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-57721-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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