An often colorful novel that refreshingly doesn’t fall back on clichés.
Two troubled Trinidadian women discover a surprising connection in this debut novel.
Trinidadian immigrant Bea Clark is a successful history professor living in Boston, but despite her accomplishments, she suffers from crippling depression. Her low self-esteem springs both from her father’s abandonment of the family when she was young and her mother’s near-constant criticism (including typical belittling comments such as “I don't know what I do wrong in this life to deserve a child like you”). After Bea lands in a psychiatric facility following a nervous breakdown, she starts the slow process of rebuilding her life, including shifting her career to clinical psychology. In Trinidad, 15-year-old Tina Ramlogan is also adrift, as her mother, Nalini, refuses to divulge the identity of her father. When Nalini dies in a tragic accident, orphaned Tina is sent to live in Port of Spain with her stern, conservative grandmother, and before long, Tina is acting out in typical teenage fashion. When a twist of fate brings Tina and Bea together, they discover a hidden connection that may help them create a new family—and finally give them both the sense of belonging they long for. Readers will find it a pleasure to watch Bea and Tina evolve as their circumstances change over the courses of their story arcs. Persaud offers an equally enjoyable glimpse into the close-knit, and sometimes-claustrophobic, Trinidadian society. Tina’s first-person narration is lively and humorous, delivered in a distinctive island patois that makes the feisty teen jump off the page. Bea’s sections, written in a more distant third person, lack the same intimacy, and as a result, she’s less distinct—more a combination of traits than a full-fledged person. The shifts in point of view can be jarring at times, and readers may occasionally feel as if two separate novels have been awkwardly stitched together. In the end, however, the characters’ deep pain, particularly Tina’s, comes through in a story that illustrates the cancerous power of long-held family secrets and the relief that can come from finally confronting the truth.
An often colorful novel that refreshingly doesn’t fall back on clichés.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0992697709
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Blue China Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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