by Iman Verjee ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2016
A unique, powerful voice in African literature.
When Leena Kohli returns home to Kenya after three years in London, she's forced to reckon with the personal and national trauma that forced her abroad.
Verjee’s second novel (In Between Dreams, 2014) explores the nuanced, layered intricacies of racial politics in east Africa beyond black and white, focusing on the tensions between Africans and Indians living in post–British imperialism Kenya. While many Indians have left Kenya in the midst of political upheaval—“most of his friends have taken their families abroad to avoid the possible messy outcome of a rigged election”—Leena’s father, Raj, has decided his family will remain in Kenya and work for the greater good. Raj has groomed Leena's brother, Jai, to follow in the footsteps of his particular brand of idealistic activism, but life in Kenya is too much for Leena. Less than 24 hours after her return, she's assaulted by vandals, and her pleas for help are ignored by the corrupt police until Jai bribes them. Throughout all this, the mystery of the traumatic event that propelled Leena’s absence from Kenya drives the narrative. With her father and brother focused on politics and her entire family ignoring the depth of her pain, Leena finds refuge in a rekindled relationship with a childhood friend. Intertwined with Leena’s narrative is the story of jaded policeman Jeffery Omondi’s Orwellian descent into corruption, until the two storylines eventually come to a climactic head. While at times excessively coy in revealing information, the novel is rich in profound observations of character, psychology, and human nature. Moving seamlessly between present, past, and further past, Verjee creates stories within stories, rounding out her characters by presenting each as the fully-realized hero of his or her own story.
A unique, powerful voice in African literature.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78074-936-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
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by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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