A pulpy adventure story set in colonial Venezuela.
A debut novel tells the story of an indigenous man seeking his Spanish father in 17th-century South America.
Jabuti is a young, single man of the Piaroa, living in a village near the Orinoco River in Venezuela in 1697. Despite a reasonably good life, Jabuti can’t help but feel unsatisfied: “He had good friends, a peaceful village to live in and food in his belly, but he could not shake off the gnawing feeling of loneliness and despair, which haunted his every waking moment....But why can’t I break the spell?” He decides to consult the village shaman, who reveals to the man the secret of his origins: Jabuti is not an orphan, as he has grown up believing. Instead, his father is still alive. What’s more, he is one of the feared white men from across the sea who established a settlement in the lands of the Piaroa. With his best friends, Wanadi and Mapi, Jabuti sets out to find his father, even though it means leaving the safety of his village and journeying through a jungle full of dangers. The three quickly locate white men, but they prove to be trickier than any of them could have guessed. In his quest to discover his father—and himself—Jabuti’s trek through the jungle turns out to be just the beginning of a much longer odyssey. Shedlake (A Courageous Heart, 2017, etc.) writes in an expressive prose that keeps the tension high. The book is full of the sort of first contact moments that readers expect from a novel set in this New World milieu: “He had a dirty and straggly beard, interrupted by an angry looking scar….He held what looked like a weapon to Jabuti with a wooden grip and a fanciful long snout attached to it. Jabuti couldn’t take his eyes off the beautifully sculpted object as it glistened in the sun’s rays.” The slim work is only the first episode in a longer series (two more installments have since been published). As such, it doesn’t really stand on its own. But for those interested in the early colonial period in South America, this straightforward historical escapade provides all the requisite drama.
A pulpy adventure story set in colonial Venezuela.Pub Date: May 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9926489-2-3
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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