Cooper’s manufactured folktale pulls all the expected strings too hard.
This multigenerational saga about African-Americans in a small Oklahoma town covers a large chunk of the 20th century.
The novel’s 91-year-old narrator, who plays no active role and has no viable reason to know the intimate details of the characters’ stories, allows Cooper (Wild Stars Seeing Midnight Suns, 2006, etc.) to adopt a folksy, sometimes preachy tone—with a decided sympathy for Jehovah’s Witness theology—and a casual approach to dates and facts that might be considered sloppy otherwise. Hattie B. Brown explains that her story is shaped like a “Y,” two strands coming together. The “Strong” line is much more substantially developed. In 1910, Val Strong, a cowboy of mixed African and Native American parentage, marries teacher Irene Lowell and builds her a house in Wideland, Okla., where they raise two daughters. Independent Tante leaves for college back East and never looks back, but passive Rose stays in her parents’ house after their deaths. A teacher like her mother, Rose marries smooth-talking Leroy and has a daughter, Myine Wee, but Leroy takes up with an old girlfriend. Evil Tonya poisons Rose, then knocks off Leroy for good measure so she can claim possession of the house. She turns Myine Wee into a Cinderella stepdaughter servant. Eventually Myine Wee hears from Aunt Tante, now living in France, who swoops into town to save the house and give Myine Wee start-up cash to finish her education and become a teacher. Meanwhile, one of Rose’s best students, Herman Tenderman, is making his way in the world—getting a college degree, joining the navy, working as head mechanic in a garage where he’s paid less than the less-skilled whites, marrying a floozy he eventually leaves. As the years speed by, along with the chapters—and they do speed—Herman and Myine Wee cross paths frequently. Although they are obviously made for each other, not until they are approaching their 60s do they acknowledge their love and complete Ms. Brown’s “Y.”
Cooper’s manufactured folktale pulls all the expected strings too hard.Pub Date: March 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-51134-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A daring concept not so daringly developed.
In Kidd’s (The Invention of Wings, 2014, etc.) feminist take on the New Testament, Jesus has a wife whose fondest longing is to write.
Ana is the daughter of Matthias, head scribe to Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee. She demonstrates an exceptional aptitude for writing, and Matthias, for a time, indulges her with reed pens, papyri, and other 16 C.E. office supplies. Her mother disapproves, but her aunt, Yaltha, mentors Ana in the ways of the enlightened women of Alexandria, from whence Yaltha, suspected of murdering her brutal husband, was exiled years before. Yaltha was also forced to give up her daughter, Chaya, for adoption. As Ana reaches puberty, parental tolerance of her nonconformity wanes, outweighed by the imperative to marry her off. Her adopted brother, Judas—yes, that Judas—is soon disowned for his nonconformity—plotting against Antipas. On the very day Ana, age 14, meets her prospective betrothed, the repellent Nathanial, in the town market, she also encounters Jesus, a young tradesman, to whom she’s instantly drawn. Their connection deepens after she encounters Jesus in the cave where she is concealing her writings about oppressed women. When Nathanial dies after his betrothal to Ana but before their marriage, Ana is shunned for insufficiently mourning him—and after refusing to become Antipas’ concubine, she is about to be stoned until Jesus defuses the situation with that famous admonition. She marries Jesus and moves into his widowed mother’s humble compound in Nazareth, accompanied by Yaltha. There, poverty, not sexism, prohibits her from continuing her writing—office supplies are expensive. Kidd skirts the issue of miracles, portraying Jesus as a fully human and, for the period, accepting husband—after a stillbirth, he condones Ana’s practice of herbal birth control. A structural problem is posed when Jesus’ active ministry begins—what will Ana’s role be? Problem avoided when, notified by Judas that Antipas is seeking her arrest, she and Yaltha journey to Alexandria in search of Chaya. In addition to depriving her of the opportunity to write the first and only contemporaneous gospel, removing Ana from the main action destroys the novel’s momentum.
A daring concept not so daringly developed.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-42976-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Beah draws on both his life and imagination to depict children leading brave, provisional lives.
Five grifter children band together, holed up in an abandoned fuselage in Zimbabwe.
We meet Beah's protagonists as an unnamed narrator glimpses a boy in a Zimbabwean forest before the boy slips away. The child has heard an elaborate whistle and answered it, the all-clear of four adolescents and one small girl surviving by their wits. Elimane, Khoudiemata, Ndevui, Kpindi, and Namsa have come together to shelter in the remains of a crashed airplane covered with foliage. But these are no boxcar children—each day they fan out to scam and steal their daily portion with a zest that Dickens’ Fagin would admire. They sneer at government workers along the road: “The census meant nothing. It was just another ploy that let those in power pretend that something was being done.” It’s an ingenious setup from the author of A Long Way Gone (2007), a memoir of Beah's harrowing coming-of-age in Sierra Leone as a child soldier. That book created a sensation—though some questioned its accuracy, Beah stands by his story—and his fiction is clearly informed by both his experiences with trauma and as a Los Angeles–based married father of three. When his characters become entangled with a crime syndicate midbook, their deeds grow graver, and the children blot out their fear with ganja and alcohol: “They were upset about not only what they had taken part in, but what it stirred up for them as well.” As the rainy season resumes, their old plane leaks more each year. Khoudiemata, perhaps the cleverest in the little family, starts a beach flirtation with a clique of rich young elites, who declare she is “fresh, original, real, and mysteriously unusual in a great way.” The awkwardness of that phrase conveys the belabored writing that occasionally detracts from the story. Still, readers will be drawn to discover what befalls a group fending for itself amid conflict and crime.
Beah draws on both his life and imagination to depict children leading brave, provisional lives.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1177-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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