Is there any shaman-reviewer with magic strong enough to lay claws on this first novel about Hell Beast and Ka, Kane and Eran, Agon and Eena and Sagon and Elina—figures whose spirit-song whistles through an epic set 30,000 years ago, when all existence was a snake pit of souls writhing in rock and water, axe and lightning bolt?
Prehistorian Dann's cave-dwelling lovers, Agon and Eena, are Cro-Magnons whom he sees as "modern-looking" and imbued with all the emotional qualities of humans today. They're tremendously spiritual, too, reading signs of spirit-life wherever they look. Dann's folk live in Eurasia during an interglacial period when great rivers race everywhere, helping account for frequent avalanches and monstrously frenzied storms, including massive lightning bolts that can explode trees, crack rock, and split open mountains should the plot call for it. When Eena first meets Agon, a bison-hunt leader, she sees that "he moved with the strength of a young lion, his magic so strong it radiated from him like heat from a fire." As time passes, Eena, abrim with her own magic tie to Mother Earth, earns the title of Spear Woman and Agon that of Axe Man. His amazing axe—an antler handle with head bound by thongs—whirls so fast that it sings as it disappears when thrown toward a victim. Agon's axe song alone can fight the vicious spearmen of the tribe of invaders led by Ka, a shaman who is evil incarnate. When Ka destroys Agon's tribe and snatches off Eena, Agon must pursue the demon to recover his pregnant beloved. Then a falling star blots out the sun—for how long? Agon at last becomes a titanic figure, feared by enemies bent on murdering him, even his own son Eran.
Impressive research lends flintiness to a work that holds up well indeed to Jean Auel's Earth's Children trilogy.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-86984-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
Categories: GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
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Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
In this follow-up to the widely read The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018), a young concentration camp survivor is sentenced to 15 years’ hard labor in a Russian gulag.
The novel begins with the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops in 1945. In the camp, 16-year-old Cecilia "Cilka" Klein—one of the Jewish prisoners introduced in Tattooist—was forced to become the mistress of two Nazi commandants. The Russians accuse her of collaborating—they also think she might be a spy—and send her to the Vorkuta Gulag in Siberia. There, another nightmarish scenario unfolds: Cilka, now 18, and the other women in her hut are routinely raped at night by criminal-class prisoners with special “privileges”; by day, the near-starving women haul coal from the local mines in frigid weather. The narrative is intercut with Cilka’s grim memories of Auschwitz as well as her happier recollections of life with her parents and sister before the war. At Vorkuta, her lot improves when she starts work as a nurse trainee at the camp hospital under the supervision of a sympathetic woman doctor who tries to protect her. Cilka also begins to feel the stirrings of romantic love for Alexandr, a fellow prisoner. Though believing she is cursed, Cilka shows great courage and fortitude throughout: Indeed, her ability to endure trauma—as well her heroism in ministering to the sick and wounded—almost defies credulity. The novel is ostensibly based on a true story, but a central element in the book—Cilka’s sexual relationship with the SS officers—has been challenged by the Auschwitz Memorial Research Center and by the real Cilka’s stepson, who says it is false. As in Tattooist, the writing itself is workmanlike at best and often overwrought.
Though gripping, even moving at times, the novel doesn’t do justice to the solemn history from which it is drawn.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-26570-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Categories: RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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