An affecting if uneven debut.
Emotional courtroom drama explores the lingering psycological and social effects of the Jim Crow South.
For 35 years, Josup Noble, an African-American convicted of killing a white boy, has preferred to languish in a Georgia state prison rather than subject his family to the scrutiny that a second trial would require. For 35 years, his daughter Gilly has worked for his release, launching an impressive law career and lining up powerful allies in order to build a solid case. While her desire for invulnerability has won her education, connections and power, it has also fueled her escalating alcoholism. The author articulates the most damaging effects–a preference for fantasy over reality and a need to push others away–persuasively and without fanfare. After a mawkish, turgid opening visit between father and daughter, Taylor’s debut, though riddled with spelling and punctuation hiccups, moves with unexpected freshness through the events leading to Noble’s second trial. A pro bono case Gilly takes for a family friend leads her to a long-lost wayward brother, whose trial and execution both draws Gilly’s extended family together and pushes her to reveal the secret that will set her father–and herself–free. In her focus on the love between adult children and parents and on interracial love and rape, in her skillful release of a series of family revelations, and in her nimble movement through the strata of contemporary African-American life, the author covers much the same ground as Alice Randall in her recent Pushkin and the Queen of Spades (2004). Taylor, however, offers punchier dialogue and more suspense, albeit amidst less accomplished prose.
An affecting if uneven debut.Pub Date: May 31, 2005
ISBN: 1-58736-464-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Mimi Smithers knew right from childhood in Lubbock, Texas, that she was destined for an extraordinary life—and she gets just what she's always wanted in this uneven, often sexually explicit, comedy of manners by Plunket (My Search for Warren Harding, 1983). Ambitious Mimi, a Bronxville matron who loves to shop, tells her own story, beginning with a disastrous party for an arts group at which Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III is the honored guest. Bored with suburban life and husband Boyce (who, for the necessary plot resolution, works for Union Carbide), Mimi tries analysis, but a chance encounter with debonair Tom Potts while shopping is more what's needed. Tom has his own firm and asks Mimi to be his assistant. Mimi, smitten by Tom, is thrilled, but Tom is gay, which takes Mimi a while to figure out (she tends to be a little slow), though that doesn't stop her from having fun as she accompanies him and his friends around 1980's gay New York. At a picnic she meets gay-porn star Joel, an ambitious hunk, who employs her to run his profitable mail-order business. Besotted, she funds the great porn film that Joel writes and directs, and gets to know a lot of lowlife people—but then the film flops, Joel dumps her, and Mimi's left with the bills. Rescue is at hand, however: husband Boyce, who's been working in India, conveniently dies in the Bhopal disaster. With the money Union Carbide pays out to her, Mimi can pay her debts, buy an apartment on Sutton Place, and, with Tom now dead from AIDS, set out to take over his job. ``It was going to be fabulous,'' she trills. An absurd plot, obvious satire, and humor more sleazy than black—plus a heroine who's just plain dumb, and unappealingly so. Thin camp.
Pub Date: April 22, 1992
ISBN: 0-06-016660-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
A stunning supernatural Southern gothic.
The remote Arkansas bayou is a swirling kaleidoscope of murder, greed, and dark, ancient magic in Bram Stoker Award finalist Davidson’s second novel (In the Valley of the Sun, 2017).
The rotting Holy Day Church and Sabbath House, where the preacher Billy Cotton held his congregants in his thrall, serves as a painful reminder to 21-year-old Miranda Crabtree of the night 10 years ago when she and her father, Hiram, the boatman, took the midwife (and witch) Iskra there to deliver Cotton's son. As soon as Cotton laid eyes on the infant’s mottled, scaly skin and webbed hands, he called him an abomination and tried to kill him. Iskra had other ideas, and the baby, whom Miranda called Littlefish, survived. But Hiram disappeared that night, and she’s since dreamed of finding his body (because he’s surely dead) and laying him to rest. It's Miranda’s love for the mute, goodhearted Littlefish that has kept her going, and with Iskra's help, she's spent years running her father's general store and eventually running dope for Cotton and his cruel and corrupt deputy, Charlie Riddle, to make ends meet. Now, Billy Cotton’s kingdom has crumbled around him and his body is riddled with cancer. Before dying, he’s desperate to appease the angry ghost of his wife, who died in childbirth, but he’ll need a sacrifice. On Miranda’s last run for Riddle, she’s ordered to deliver a young girl to Cotton, which she’s not about to do even though she knows her refusal will start a war she might not survive. But she’s ready, and the time for a reckoning has come. Davidson’s captivating horror fable combines the visceral violence of Cormac McCarthy with his own wholly original craftsmanship, weaving rich, folkloric magic with the best elements of a gritty Southern thriller. The book's lightning-fast pace doesn’t come at the expense of fully realized, flawed, and achingly human characters. Ample bloodshed is offset by beautiful prose, and the bad guys are really, really bad. Luckily, Miranda, a young woman forged in hardship and grief and buoyed by her love of a very special child, is a perfect foil for the evil she’ll have to face.
A stunning supernatural Southern gothic.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-53855-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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