Almost mythic in its ambition, somewhere between Oates and Updike country, and thoroughly satisfying.
An elegant, elegiac multigenerational saga about a small coal-mining community in western Pennsylvania that shows how talented she really is.
Fast on the heels of her PEN/Hemingway-winning if stagy first novel (Mrs. Kimble, 2003), Haigh turns a careful, loving eye on the sociology of the town of Bakerton, resting her focus most intently on the Poles and Italians who work together but live in their own neighborhoods. At the heart of the story are the five children of Stanley Novak, a Polish miner, and his Italian wife Rose. When Stanley dies of a heart attack in 1944, oldest son George is away in the Pacific. Eighteen-year-old Dorothy, diffident and plain, takes a secretarial position in Washington, DC, after losing her factory job. High-schooler Joyce shows unusual academic gifts. Eight-year-old Sandy is a charmer. And Lucy is a baby. Over the years, the siblings, along with a host of friends and neighbors, grow and evolve, sometimes as expected, sometimes not. George, eager to escape the mines, marries into a wealthy Philadelphia family (the one jarring note here being his spoiled wife’s lack of redeeming characteristics) and erases his connection with home. Dorothy, broken by her experience in the outside world, returns to Bakerton, where she’s redeemed by a love affair with a divorced man. Joyce attempts to escape into the Air Force but comes back home out of a sense of duty to her ailing mother, then slowly builds a rewarding life for herself. Sandy becomes a drifter. Well-educated, thanks to Joyce, Lucy chooses life in Bakerton. Their lives unfold in episodes that tie the individual to the community, and the lines of connection between characters—even the most minor—weave an intricate social tapestry. By the time the mines close for good, every thread connects.
Almost mythic in its ambition, somewhere between Oates and Updike country, and thoroughly satisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-050941-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
In this vivid and moving book, Orange articulates the challenges and complexities not only of Native Americans, but also of...
Orange’s debut novel offers a kaleidoscopic look at Native American life in Oakland, California, through the experiences and perspectives of 12 characters.
An aspiring documentary filmmaker, a young man who has taught himself traditional dance by watching YouTube, another lost in the bulk of his enormous body—these are just a few of the point-of-view characters in this astonishingly wide-ranging book, which culminates with an event called the Big Oakland Powwow. Orange, who grew up in the East Bay and is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, knows the territory, but this is no work of social anthropology; rather, it is a deep dive into the fractured diaspora of a community that remains, in many ways, invisible to many outside of it. “We made powwows because we needed a place to be together,” he writes. “Something intertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work toward, for our jewelry, our songs, our dances, our drum.” The plot of the book is almost impossible to encapsulate, but that’s part of its power. At the same time, the narrative moves forward with propulsive force. The stakes are high: For Jacquie Red Feather, on her way to meet her three grandsons for the first time, there is nothing as conditional as sobriety: “She was sober again,” Orange tells us, “and ten days is the same as a year when you want to drink all the time.” For Daniel Gonzales, creating plastic guns on a 3-D printer, the only lifeline is his dead brother, Manny, to whom he writes at a ghostly Gmail account. In its portrayal of so-called “Urban Indians,” the novel recalls David Treuer’s The Hiawatha, but the range, the vision, is all its own. What Orange is saying is that, like all people, Native Americans don’t share a single identity; theirs is a multifaceted landscape, made more so by the sins, the weight, of history. That some of these sins belong to the characters alone should go without saying, a point Orange makes explicit in the novel’s stunning, brutal denouement. “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them,” James Baldwin wrote in a line Orange borrows as an epigraph to one of the book’s sections; this is the inescapable fate of every individual here.
In this vivid and moving book, Orange articulates the challenges and complexities not only of Native Americans, but also of America itself.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52037-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
A lovely read—entertaining, poignant, and meaningful.
After facing tragedy and betrayal in New York, an aspiring fashion designer escapes to her idyllic Pacific coast hometown to raise her best friend’s two young children and finds inspiration, redemption, and love in the unexpected journey.
Caroline Shelby always dreamed of leaving tiny Oysterville, Washington, and becoming a couturier. After years of toil, she finally has a big break only to discover a famous designer has stolen her launch line. When she accuses him, he blackballs her, so she’s already struggling when her best friend, Angelique, a renowned model from Haiti whose work visa has expired, shows up on her doorstep with her two biracial children, running from an abusive partner she won’t identify. When Angelique dies of a drug overdose, Caroline takes custody of the kids and flees back to her hometown. She reconnects with her sprawling family and with Will and Sierra Jensen, who were once her best friends, though their relationships have grown more complicated since Will and Sierra married. Caroline feels guilty that she didn’t realize Angelique was abused and tries to make a difference when she discovers that people she knows in Oysterville are also victims of domestic violence. She creates a support group that becomes a welcome source of professional assistance when some designs she works on for the kids garner local interest that grows regional, then national. Meanwhile, restless Sierra pursues her own dreams, leading to Will and Caroline’s exploring some unresolved feelings. Wiggs’ latest is part revenge fantasy and part romantic fairy tale, and while some details feel too smooth—how fortunate that every person in the circle has some helpful occupation that benefits Caroline's business—Caroline has a challenging road, and she rises to it with compassion and resilience. Timelines alternating among the present and past, both recent and long ago, add tension and depth to a complex narrative that touches on the abuse of power toward women and the extra-high stakes when the women involved are undocumented. Finally, Wiggs writes about the children’s race and immigration status with a soft touch that feels natural and easygoing but that might seem unrealistic to some readers.
A lovely read—entertaining, poignant, and meaningful.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-242558-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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