A refreshingly unconventional and bold account of a culturally complex place in Africa.
A part-historical, part-fictional debut book focuses on a Danish settlement in Ghana.
Long before it was successively explored by European countries, Osu was a culturally diverse community in Ghana, home to a variety of indigenous tribes. Then the Portuguese arrived; they not only introduced a wide variety of goods, from tobacco to cloth, but also left an indelible imprint on the Ga language. They were eventually forced out, and the Swedes took their place in the middle of the 17th century only to suffer a similar fate and become supplanted by the Danes, who built a fort they called Christiansborg after their king. Osu became Danish-Osu, and a legacy of cultural assimilation, including intermarriage and generations of mulatto children, challenged the moral climate as well as the preservation of the area’s traditions. One of Danish-Osu’s most historically prominent figures, Christian Petersen Witt, was among the first of this mulatto generation. Eventually, Danish-Osu became a central hub of the Danish trans-Atlantic slave trade, which left a dark legacy of oppression and inhumanity. Wellington has composed an eccentric history that seamlessly blends fact and fanciful fiction—the book is structured almost like a Socratic dialogue, with the mythical figure Ataa Forkoyi, known for his remarkable knowledge of Osu’s genesis, leading a kind of extemporaneous tutorial. He uses the stones left by the Danish settlers of Osu, thousands of them brought for the construction of massive edifices, as historical signposts, almost like fossils that contain an unspoken record. Wellington’s peculiar literary approach intriguingly wrestles the telling of history away from its conventional academic forms, making the life of Osu a vivacious one. In addition, the volume courageously confronts the grim slavery years, defying the Danes’ tendency to gloss over their unseemly participation and the habits of the Ghanaian people to avoid speaking of that era entirely: “Adopting a position of honest confrontation of the horrors of the past will make the lessons to be learnt from this dark period in our common history authentic and proactive.”
A refreshingly unconventional and bold account of a culturally complex place in Africa.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Amerley Treb Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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