Allende is too caught up in drawing historical and political parallels to imbue her characters with life.
A novel about all sorts of characters crossing all sorts of borders.
Allende’s latest begins in Vienna on Kristallnacht, when Samuel Adler’s father is beaten so badly he eventually dies from his injuries. But Samuel doesn’t find that out until years have passed: After Samuel’s mother places him on a Kindertransport train to England, he loses touch with both parents. Then Allende jumps to the United States, where Leticia Cordero has ended up (illegally) after narrowly surviving the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador. In alternating chapters, Allende also describes Anita Díaz, a 7-year-old girl separated from her mother in a detention facility after crossing illegally into Arizona; Selena, a social worker trying to help Anita; and Frank, a hotshot lawyer who joins Anita’s case because he has the hots for Selena. Eventually—predictably—all these storylines intersect. Unfortunately, the two-dimensional characters never come to life. Neither does their dialogue, which is overstuffed with exposition. Allende uses her characters shamelessly as political mouthpieces. Hapless Frank, for example, complains: “But we can’t just open the floodgates and let millions of immigrants and refugees in. What’s the solution, Selena?” Selena, as you can imagine, tells him. This tactic appears throughout the book, which leans heavily on blatant exposition and draws heavy-handed parallels between Hitler’s Europe and Trump’s America. “Hitler used terror as a political tactic,” Allende writes, “taking advantage of discontent over economic woes.” This habit might have been more tolerable if Allende’s conclusions weren’t so trite. On Kristallnacht, she writes, a “sense of misfortune hung in the air.” There is little here that is original and even less that is genuinely moving.
Allende is too caught up in drawing historical and political parallels to imbue her characters with life.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9780593598108
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.
Who was Shakespeare?
Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name, “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. Melina’s story is less vivid: Where Emilia found support from the witty Christopher Marlowe, Melina has a fashion-loving gay roommate; where Emilia faces the ravages of repeated outbreaks of plague, for Melina, Covid-19 occurs largely offstage; where Emilia has a passionate affair with the adoring Earl of Southampton, Melina’s lover is an awkward New York Times theater critic. It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life.
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780593497210
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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