A captivating and inspiring story of struggle and acceptance in the prewar dream factory.
A black vaudevillian finds success and adventure on the silver screen.
The latest novel from Ravage (Grandpa Ben and His Pirates, 2012, etc.) opens backstage at the Memphis Star Theater in 1939 at a black vaudeville performance where Ted Masters paces the wings. Ted’s a talented, tasteful, teetotaling musician and dancer who, in his own words, gets “kicked on my butt so often it’s got Neolite stamped on it.” His bandleader fires him; his girlfriend walks out on him; and more than a few of his friends urge him to give up the circuit and start afresh. Arriving in Los Angeles, he meets Francine “Frank” Compton, a cross-dressing cabdriver who shows him the town and introduces him to the cluster of theater owners, promoters, and producers who hustle Ted his first Hollywood gig. Worried at first he might have what booker Benny Pickles calls “the same chances in pictures as any other black man with looks and talent—between zero and none,” Ted soon finds luck with Sid Grauman, owner of the eponymous Chinese Theater, and dreams he didn’t know he had start coming true. As celluloid cowboy Rod Lang, he rides, strums, and dances his way through his first screen Western, a crossover B-roll for Republic Pictures called Silver Sage. Along the way, he suffers the indignities of low-budget filmmaking, the mysteries of the growing industry (“what amounts to a small town wrapped inside a big city”), and the thrill of seeing his name in lights. He also encounters his old flame Carmen Lassouer, a reunion fraught with so much passion it leads to gunplay. In a ghostly touch, Ravage gives Ted a spectral revenant for an interlocutor, the spirit of the planter who owned Ted’s ancestors and from whom his family takes its name. That name is Masters, and the somewhat obvious pun the author exploits with it (the slave owner was one sort of master, but Ted is entirely another) is one of the few moments when the book’s gears come too much into view. But in the overwhelming body of the text, Ravage evokes questions of race with rare delicacy and descriptions of midcentury Hollywood with learned skill (“Movie stars are made, not born, bucko. Nobody came out of his mommie looking for the key light or the makeup man”). This is both a pleasurable and an illuminating book.
A captivating and inspiring story of struggle and acceptance in the prewar dream factory.Pub Date: June 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5434-2602-1
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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