A testament to the strength of women and girls with a side of philosophy, myth, and metaphysics.
Brace yourself: The end of the world is coming. Or is it? A multilayered, Indigenous-inflected version of the apocalypse that resists predictability.
Calliope Santiago is an anthropologist and a young mother heavily pregnant with twins the day the Earth changes forever. As she’s driving home from her job as a professor at the University of New Mexico, there’s a blinding flash, and Calliope crashes her car. When she comes to, everyone else is gone, rapture-style. Well, almost everyone—Calliope’s 6-year-old neighbor, Eunjoo, also remains, inexplicably. The two flee Albuquerque, where long-dormant volcanoes, newly awakened, are burying the city in molten lava, and head for Calliope’s aunt’s hacienda in the Gila Mountains to the south. On the way, Calliope and Eunjoo amass an unlikely crew of fellow left-behinds, each with his or her role to play as their odyssey unfolds. The author of several poetry collections, first-time novelist Givhan employs Southwestern Puebloan mythology to inform the plot—as when Kachina dolls come to life as the monstrous and deadly Suuke, half-gods, half-monsters hell-bent on destroying Calliope and her companions. Givhan also makes contemporary connections, as when she invokes Kennewick Man, the ancient skeleton discovered in Washington state in the 1990s, and refers to the years of controversy between scientists, the U.S. government, and Native American tribes before the remains were eventually repatriated. Another character, Mara, who’s the partner of Calliope’s missing aunt, witnessed the birth of the atomic bomb in the 1940s when her father was sent to Los Alamos to work on the top-secret Manhattan project. Mara often links the nuclear terror of her childhood and the rending they’re witnessing near the end of her life. Givhan’s themes are complex and occasionally compete with the twists and turns of the plot for a reader’s attention. Still, texture and nuance are rare among disaster narratives and are welcome here.
A testament to the strength of women and girls with a side of philosophy, myth, and metaphysics.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5385-5672-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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