A luminous fusion of art and verse that finds penetrating new insights in sacred traditions.
Biblical characters grope their ways toward psycho-spiritual enlightenment in this illustrated work.
Weill retells three stories from the book of Genesis, subtly inflecting them with psychoanalytic and existentialist motifs. The first is the advent of Adam in “the garden of now”—Eve never appears—where his task is to complete the act of creation by seeing and naming the things in the world, a metaphor for a child’s efforts to gain awareness as an independent being. Upon eating the fruit of the tree of Evil and Good, Adam becomes aware of his failings and is expelled from the garden of now and “tossed into history” and “suffering.” The author continues to the story of Cain, whose murder of his brother, Abel, embodies the psychic conflicts of adolescence. Cain tries to define himself by putting his own desires for love, fame, and power over his regard for others, although he worries that it’s all a meaningless fracas that ends only in death. His personal moral crisis plays out against images of war, tyranny, and religious antagonism. The soulful book’s third part meditates on the story of Abraham’s readiness to obey God’s commandment to sacrifice his son, Isaac, only to be stopped at the last moment by an angel. The episode is a turning point that leaves Abraham fully mature and capable of freely defining himself through moral choice. Weill’s beguiling text unfolds in simple, poetic lines, limpid and earnest. (“When Cain stands at the mirror to examine his face / and he peers into eyes of concern, / he fears his existence is a mechanical race / that there is nothing to win and nothing to earn.”) The author pairs the text with knotty yet lyrical illustrations that usually foreground a man, often in a business suit, engaging pensively with an uncertain landscape—gazing into mirrors, trudging along railroad tracks toward an unknown destination, or hula-hooping when the way forward becomes clearer. Painted in pastel washes of color and populated with whimsical, cartoonish renderings of everything from dinosaur skeletons to ice cream cones to a minimalist caricature of Gandhi, Weill’s visuals bring out the work’s themes in surprising and delightful ways.
A luminous fusion of art and verse that finds penetrating new insights in sacred traditions.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0985800321
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Jean-Pierre Weill Studios
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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