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
Nothing terribly fresh here, but it goes down easily.
A flashy heroine who falls from grace, a child who helps her regain perspective, an estranged sister to reconcile with, and a couple of handsome and successful male foils—this novel has all the ingredients of a tasty beach read.
Sunshine Mackenzie is a YouTube sensation who's about to become the next Food Network star—until a hater hacks into her Twitter account and outs her as a fraud. Not only does this celebrity chef not know how to cook, but she doesn’t even have an authentic biography—her whole Southern farmer's daughter persona was created by a TV producer looking for just the right face to front a food show. When she loses everything, she slinks back to her real childhood home, which happens to be in Montauk and where she has an angry sister she hasn’t seen in years. But Sunshine isn’t one to let life knock her down without getting up again, so Dave (Eight Hundred Grapes, 2015, etc.) provides a few paths to redemption: Sunshine bonds with her young niece, makes an actual friend, and tries to win her way back into the food world by doing her own work, this time in the kitchen of a demanding, Thomas Keller–like chef. Dave tries to juxtapose authenticity, privacy, and reality with extremes of exposure and fakery in both the virtual world and the real one, but the book never really takes off with these themes. Still, Sunshine doesn’t go entirely unredeemed, and the story is fun to read in the same way cooking shows are fun to watch.
Nothing terribly fresh here, but it goes down easily.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8932-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Obsession and megalomania, sex and power make for a sophisticated, literate and well-crafted paranormal horror.
Something wicked this way comes in Nevill’s (The Ritual, 2012, etc.) modern horror tale.
Kyle Freeman is a respected but deep-in-debt London-based documentary filmmaker. Contacted by Max Solomon, a prosperous New-Age publisher, Freeman’s asked to make a film about The Temple of the Last Days, a 1960-1970s hippie-era cult that is an autocratic semireligious lifestyle stew of everything from Scientology to Buddhism, at least until it culminated in mass murder in Arizona. Solomon has prearranged travel and script, and he pressures Freeman to agree immediately. The fact the fee is £100,000 makes quick acquiescence easy. The fact that Solomon himself originated the cult’s predecessor group, The Last Gathering, is kept secret. Solomon meant well, only wanting to “create one small pocket of cooperation and decency.” That lasted until Sister Katherine assumed leadership. Katherine, sociopathic daughter of a down-and-out aristocrat, had spent time in prison for running a brothel. Freeman, along with cameraman Dan, travels to sites of the cult’s activity, from Clarendon Road to Normandy to Arizona and back to London, meeting warped witnesses to the paranormal. At each site, Freeman himself experiences apparitions and manifestations, enough to provoke hallucinogenic nightmares. Only after Freeman visits Antwerp and examines an ancient triptych painted by Niclaes Verhulst does he comprehend that the skeletal demons who have manifested through walls intent on mayhem—demons that he has experienced at each site and at his apartment—can be traced to the Blood Friends, ghosts of followers of an Anabaptist heretic, Konrad Lorche, leader of a 16th-century religious commune. After Lorche declared himself God’s one king and fed a French bishop to a pig, he and his followers were besieged, captured, and burned alive or beheaded—only to linger in some hellish purgatory to await remanifestation. Neville’s writing is deft and believable. Tension abounds, right up to a long, bloody denouement at Sister Katherine’s luxurious California mansion, where the Blood Friends await rejuvenation.
Obsession and megalomania, sex and power make for a sophisticated, literate and well-crafted paranormal horror.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-01818-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
