This slowly building novel avoids stereotype, offering a captivating narrative with nuanced perceptions of death, love, and...
Khosi, a 17-year-old Zulu woman, seeks to fully inhabit both spiritual traditions in which she was raised while struggling to support her younger sister, Zi.
Baptized Catholic and later chosen for induction into the spiritual traditions of her ancestors, Khosi’s fight for survival begins the day she welcomes guests to mourn her grandmother. Her Auntie is suspicious that Khosi bewitched Gogo, who had looked after Khosi and Zi since their mother passed away from HIV three years earlier. As Khosi is left with no support from her family, her beau, Little Man, sets a plan in motion to assist her—however his good intentions go awry, placing them all in physical danger. Soon after the funeral, Khosi also breaks the deathbed promises she made to her grandmother. Under the watchful eye of her ancestors, she stumbles along, setting up her own business as a spiritual healer. While the voices of the ancestors are ever present to guide her, her nursing ambitions and insightful understanding of familial relations enable her to give holistic advice to her customers. Learning of the trouble brewing in her area, Khosi delivers warnings to those involved and ends up the target of multiple groups seeking to cause her harm. This intriguing story is set against a backdrop of social upheaval due to economic discontent in contemporary, multicultural South Africa.
This slowly building novel avoids stereotype, offering a captivating narrative with nuanced perceptions of death, love, and cathartic self-discovery. (Fiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-947627-04-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
Blackwood goes from Elizabethan England (Shakespeare Stealer, not reviewed, 1998) to a Depression-Era Ozarks setting for this poker-faced tale of a self-reliant but naive teenager. Although he and his mother are dirt poor and he doesn’t remember his father, Thad is an optimist; he has a girl, a loyal bluetick hound, and a good if risky source of income, selling corn liquor for Dayman, a sour, one-armed recluse with a hidden still. He begins to get a glimmer of other lives and possibilities when Harlan James comes to town, claiming to be a land scout for tobacco growers. Harlan is well-dressed, a free spender, and free with his time, too; he allows Thad to use his fancy tackle to land a huge catfish, teaches him how to use a rifle, and even loans him clothes for a date. Blackwood knits characters together with threads of “moonshine”—not liquor, but a steady diet of stories, jokes, yarns, and outright lies’so that the story becomes a study in layers and varieties of honesty. Thad’s feeling of betrayal is sharp but brief when he finds out that Harlan is a revenue agent, stalking Dayman’s still, which literally explodes in his face. Blackwood drops plenty of hints that both Harlan and Dayman are more than they seem, so alert readers are always ahead of Thad, which adds drama; the twin revelations that Dayman is Thad’s father and that Harlan’s friendliness wasn’t all moonshine close this backwoods bildungsroman on a high note. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7614-5056-4
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
The sudden death of her twin leaves a teenager struggling with grief and her fragile sense of self in this absorbing, inwardly focused import from Sweden, part fiction, part memoir. So close are the sisters that after Cilla is killed by a motorist Tina can still hear her voice, still see her just by looking in a mirror, still hold conversations; she even finds herself taking on some of Cilla’s character traits, seeking an inner balance that she has lost. Able to describe her experiences only by switching back and forth between third person and first, Tina observes the different ways those around her grieve, and finds temporary solace in many places: reading and writing poetry, performing on stage, playing her violin, trying a brief but intense fling at summer camp, even talking to a perceptive psychologist—but unlike many such stories, there is never any sense here that the authors are running through a catalog of coping strategies, or offering trite platitudes. A year later, Tina discovers that, in forming new friendships and moving on in life, she has passed the worst of her pain, and found ways to distance herself from Cilla without losing her completely. In a smooth, natural-sounding translation, this is a thoughtful, complex reminiscence. (Fiction. 12-15)
Pub Date: March 23, 1999
ISBN: 91-29-63935-2
Page Count: 247
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
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