A complex story exploring the moral repercussions of acting or not acting.
Another well-researched psychologically astute novel from Rogers (Island, 2000, etc.).
An intriguing counterpoint is set up here between the present and the past. In 1999, Anne Harrington is taking the body of her father, a vicar, by ship from Nigeria to England for burial; and, while aboard the ship, she reads her father’s Nigeria journals, set in the early 1960s, when he was a missionary there. Wandering at night on the ship, Anne discovers Joseph, a Nigerian stowaway, who leads her to his deathly ill pregnant wife and begs her to keep their presence secret. Anne’s naiveté leads to disastrous results. She tries to help, giving the woman antibiotics and enlisting the first mate—who, seizing upon his advantage, beds her and then tells her the whole crew knows she is a “slag.” Shamed, and with no recourse, she’s incapable of finding out what has happened to the woman and her unborn child; all she knows is that crew members hate stowaways because they’re fined if a ship is found carrying them. Anne doesn’t reveal where Joseph is, and hopes that he has survived the voyage. Meanwhile, in her father’s journal, she discovers his secrets: after she was born, he had gotten a Nigerian woman pregnant and been removed from his position; her mother had had an affair with his boss; this is why he never visited them after the divorce. Given a second chance, he ends up in Biafra, caring for the mangled soldiers and starving children of the civil war. Back home in England, Anne is able to track down Joseph, who has indeed made it to England, but he wants nothing to do with her. Filled with guilt, she suffers a breakdown. In a final twist, four years later, she ends up married, submissive once again, and struggling to bear a child. In her father’s journal, she discovers a final secret: on his last day alive, her father learned that his Nigerian daughter had been sold into prostitution in Italy.
A complex story exploring the moral repercussions of acting or not acting.Pub Date: July 20, 2004
ISBN: 1-58567-509-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
A predictable romance tempers the energy of this tale about the healing powers of love.
Having escaped from a train headed to Auschwitz, Vera and Edith, two young Hungarian women, mourn their parents as well as Edith’s fiance, all likely lost to the Holocaust. Can they forge new lives in the postwar world?
After surviving the war by working on a farm, Vera and Edith realize their hometown of Budapest holds little promise. Fortuitously, a kind American officer sends them to Naples with a letter recommending Vera to the embassy. Once there, Vera, who is fluent in five languages, readily secures a job as secretary to Capt. Anton Wight, an American officer at the embassy. She’s intent upon taking care of Edith, who’s looking for male attention, which she finds with Marcus, a photographer ready to sweep her away dancing and maybe into social ruin. But it’s Vera who falls in love first, with the dashing Capt. Wight, who treats her to dinner dates and gifts. Although Vera tells Anton about her experiences during the war, including her guilt over surviving while her family presumably perished in the gas chambers, her attraction to him quickly outweighs any lingering trauma. However, Anton’s struggles with his own past derail their romance, plunging Vera into more heartache as her path traverses the globe. The romance between Vera and Capt. Wight is, unfortunately, much too easy, beginning with its inevitable whirlwind courtship. Publishing for the first time under her birth name, Abriel (Christmas in Vermont, 2019, etc., written as Anita Hughes) was inspired by her mother's life, and she deftly sketches the postwar world from Naples to Venezuela and Australia, with attention paid to the changed architectural and emotional landscapes. The rubble of bombed cities, the blank map of lost relatives, and the uncertainty of day-to-day survival outline the anguish of the lost generation.
A predictable romance tempers the energy of this tale about the healing powers of love.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2297-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
An almost-but-not-quite-great slavery novel.
The celebrated author of Between the World and Me (2015) and We Were Eight Years in Power (2017) merges magic, adventure, and antebellum intrigue in his first novel.
In pre–Civil War Virginia, people who are white, whatever their degree of refinement, are considered “the Quality” while those who are black, whatever their degree of dignity, are regarded as “the Tasked.” Whether such euphemisms for slavery actually existed in the 19th century, they are evocatively deployed in this account of the Underground Railroad and one of its conductors: Hiram Walker, one of the Tasked who’s barely out of his teens when he’s recruited to help guide escapees from bondage in the South to freedom in the North. “Conduction” has more than one meaning for Hiram. It's also the name for a mysterious force that transports certain gifted individuals from one place to another by way of a blue light that lifts and carries them along or across bodies of water. Hiram knows he has this gift after it saves him from drowning in a carriage mishap that kills his master’s oafish son (who’s Hiram’s biological brother). Whatever the source of this power, it galvanizes Hiram to leave behind not only his chains, but also the two Tasked people he loves most: Thena, a truculent older woman who practically raised him as a surrogate mother, and Sophia, a vivacious young friend from childhood whose attempt to accompany Hiram on his escape is thwarted practically at the start when they’re caught and jailed by slave catchers. Hiram directly confronts the most pernicious abuses of slavery before he is once again conducted away from danger and into sanctuary with the Underground, whose members convey him to the freer, if funkier environs of Philadelphia, where he continues to test his power and prepare to return to Virginia to emancipate the women he left behind—and to confront the mysteries of his past. Coates’ imaginative spin on the Underground Railroad’s history is as audacious as Colson Whitehead’s, if less intensely realized. Coates’ narrative flourishes and magic-powered protagonist are reminiscent of his work on Marvel’s Black Panther superhero comic book, but even his most melodramatic effects are deepened by historical facts and contemporary urgency.
An almost-but-not-quite-great slavery novel.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-59059-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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