Nicely written, but hopelessly contrived and generally unconvincing.
The story of a mother who avenges her child's rape, in this latest from Picoult (Salem Falls, 2001, etc.).
Assistant DA Nina Frost has prosecuted many cases of sexual abuse involving children—surely, she agonizes, she should have recognized the signs of it in her own son. Five-year-old Nathaniel had been wetting the bed, acting out in school, and refusing to talk. A child psychiatrist teaches him the rudiments of American Sign Language in the hopes that he will be able to communicate somehow, and then a medical examination reveals unmistakable signs of forced anal penetration. But there's no telling who did it, until Nathaniel silently gives the first clue: father. Nina is aghast. Could the husband she loves so well, stalwart stonemason Caleb Frost, have raped their son? She gets a restraining order against him. Further investigation and a photo line-up reveal still more clues: perhaps Nathaniel meant Father Glen Syzynski, a local priest. Eventually, Syzynski is charged with sexual assault, and Nina blows the priest's brains out in the courtroom, even though she doesn't know yet whether or not the DNA in his blood sample matches the DNA in the semen stain on her son's underpants. She's a mother now, not a prosecutor. Uh-oh: she finds out later that the priest had leukemia, and the blood marrow transplant that saved his life essentially gave him someone else’s blood. She shot the wrong child molester! Further investigation on her behalf reveals another possible culprit, also a priest: Father Syzynski's half-brother, Gwynn, whose name Nathaniel mispronounced. Could he be the blood donor and did he rape Nina’s son? Time and lab tests reveal the truth, as our heroine suffers the indignities of imprisonment and trial. Father Gwynn dies peacefully but mysteriously in his sleep before he can be charged . . . but justice is done, though not through the legal system.
Nicely written, but hopelessly contrived and generally unconvincing.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-1872-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
In a neighborhood where pain—"adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids"—is as pervasively omnipresent as the loveliness of May's green shade trees, death and its omens can be accepted as another face of God. But in the closed black community of the high hill overlooking a white Ohio town, there are two who stand outside the defensive webs of familial interdependence. There is mad Shadrach, victim of World War I, who defies death's capricious obscenity by ringing his bell for National Suicide Day every year—and one year he has some takers. And Sula, who will die, not like "other colored girls" rotting like a stump, but falling "like a redwood." For she is the product of a "household of throbbing disorder" and had learned isolation and the "meaningless of responsibility" early when she accidentally caused the drowning of a little boy. Intemperate, restless, Sula had some of the arrogance of her one-legged grandmother Eva. It was Eva who had long ago pondered the meaning of love when she used her only food (lard scrapings) to cure her baby boy's bellyache; yet when her son was a man, regressing to the womb of drugs, she burnt him to death. Sula also watched her mother die in flames, conscious only that she wanted the dying dance to go on. She left the village and returns to become the community's unifying evil—but will the people eventually love one who stood against the sky? Miss Morrison, author of The Bluest Eye (1970), in her deceptively gentle narrative, her dialogue that virtually speaks from the page, and her multilayered perceptions drawn through the needle's eye of any consciousness she creates, is undoubtedly a major and formidable talent, and this is an impressive second novel.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1973
ISBN: 0375415351
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1973
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