During the waning years of the British Empire, a young woman returns to her father’s Kenyan farm after boarding school in England only to find home is no longer the safe, happy place she recalls.
Rachel Fullsmith lost her mother when she was only 12, on the same day she witnessed violence at her uncle’s factory during a strike. Having grown up on her parents’ farm in the African bush, she never felt at home in England, where her bereaved father sent her after her mother's death. As soon as she finishes school, she returns to Kenya but finds another woman living in her father’s home and all the familiar routines of the farm upended both by her pseudo-stepmother’s rigid—and racist—views and by the terror of the nascent Mau Mau rebellion. Torn between the memory of her once-loving home and the trauma and loss she and the people she knew as a child have experienced, Rachel tries to understand the political and social circumstances that have altered her world. McVeigh (The Fever Tree, 2013) creates real emotional tension as Rachel tries to hang on to all that reminds her of her mother. Will she reconnect with her father? Can she grow to accept, if not love, his new family? Will treating black Kenyans with the kindness her mother taught her put Rachel in harm’s way? Will the man she saw murder a striker on the day she learned of her mother’s death become as great a threat to Rachel as the Mau Mau? All of this is set against Rachel’s growing attraction to Michael, her former tutor and her father’s employee, and the danger of their forbidden relationship. Readers who want a story that keeps them on edge will enjoy this historical novel rich with emotional and sociopolitical drama.
Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-15825-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
As vivid and moving as the novel is, it’s not because Haslett strives to surprise but because he’s so mindful and expressive...
This touching chronicle of love and pain traces half a century in a family of five from the parents’ engagement in 1963 through a father’s and son’s psychological torments and a final crisis.
Something has happened to Michael in the opening pages, which are told in the voice of his brother, Alec. The next chapter is narrated by Margaret, the mother of Michael, 12, Celia, 10, and Alec, 7, and the wife of John, as they prepare for a vacation in Maine. Soon, a flashback reveals that shortly before John and Margaret were to wed, she learned of his periodic mental illness, a “sort of hibernation” in which “the mind closes down.” She marries him anyway and comes to worry about the recurrence of his hibernations—which exacerbate their constant money problems—only to witness Michael bearing the awful legacy. Each chapter is told by one of the family’s five voices, shifting the point of view on shared troubles, showing how they grow away from one another without losing touch, how they cope with the loss of John and the challenge of Michael. Haslett (Union Atlantic, 2009, etc.) shapes these characters with such sympathy, detail, and skill that reading about them is akin to living among them. The portrait of Michael stands out: a clever, winning youth who becomes a kind of scholar of contemporary music with an empathy for black history and a wretched dependence on Klonopin and many other drugs to keep his anxiety at bay, to glimpse a “world unfettered by dread.”
As vivid and moving as the novel is, it’s not because Haslett strives to surprise but because he’s so mindful and expressive of how much precious life there is in both normalcy and anguish.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-26135-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Earnestly done, and correctly, but information trumps drama, and the heart is left out.
A carefully researched little novel, Otsuka’s first, about the US internment of Japanese citizens during WWII that’s perfect down to the tiniest detail but doesn’t stir the heart.
Shortly after the war begins, the father of an unnamed Japanese family of four in Berkeley, California, is taken from his home—not even given time to dress—and held for questioning. His wife and two children won’t see him until after war’s end four years later, when he’ll have been transformed into a suddenly very old man, afraid, broken, and unwilling to speak even a word about what happened to him. Meanwhile, from the spring of 1942 until the autumn after the armistice, the mother, age 42, with her son and daughter of 8 and 11, respectively, will be held in camps in high-desert Utah, treeless and windswept, where they’ll live in rows of wooden barracks offering little privacy, few amenities, and causing them to suffer—the mother especially—greater and greater difficulty in hanging on to any sense of hope or normality. The characters are denied even first names, perhaps as a way of giving them universality, but the device does nothing to counteract the reader’s ongoing difficulty in entering into them. Details abound—book titles, contemporary references (the Dionne quints, sugar rationing), keepsakes the children take to the camp (a watch, a blue stone), euthanizing the family dog the night before leaving for the camps—but still the narrative remains stubbornly at the surface, almost like an informational flow, causing the reader duly to acknowledge these many wrongs done to this unjustly uprooted and now appallingly deprived American family—but never finding a way to go deeper, to a place where the attention will be held rigid and the heart seized.
Earnestly done, and correctly, but information trumps drama, and the heart is left out.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41429-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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