Inspired by a painting of the same title by Belgian artist Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921)—and the first in a series of such art-inspired fictions planned by Ecco—Oates's slim (112-page) new novella tells of an interracial love affair in early 20th-century rural New York—and its mysterious, tragic consequences. Edith Honeystone's mother died shortly after the girl's birth in 1890, but not before she nicknamed the red-haired infant "Calla"—a name the child clings to as she grows into a neglected, half-wild teen-ager with no discernible future. When George Freilicht, an unprepossessing farmer, foolishly finds the girl's smile intriguing, her relatives hastily marry her off. Bewildered, Calla moves about her unloved husband's property like a sleepwalker, taking refuge in solitary flights into the woods. Meanwhile, Calla manages to bear George two children (whom she generally ignores thereafter) before she encounters a kindred spirit in Tyrell Thompson, a black water, dowser. Her ensuing obsession with the itinerant worker causes a storm of gossip, virtually destroys the Freilicht family name, and breaks the spirit of Calla's husband. Still, the lovers stubbornly cling to one another until the townfolk have created an entire myth from the seeds of their passion: Edith is pregnant, people say; the black man is seven feet tall; Edith gave birth to a tainted baby and the family drowned it in the well. . . Such tales can end only in tragedy. Answering her lover's challenge, Calla accompanies him in a rowboat to the middle of the Chautauqua River, where the two drift toward dangerous Tintern Falls and their separate destinies while gazing steadily into each other's eyes. Such people "made gestures that lasted for life," reflects Calla's granddaughter, who narrates this account while marveling that that wild woman's blood courses through her own, apparently tamer, veins. Oates provides Khnopff's haunting work of art, to be featured on the cover, with an eloquent voice in this breathless, shadowy tale.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1990
ISBN: 0865381089
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1990
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Thinness aside: riveting stuff, with language so frank it curls your hair.
Debut novel by hip-hop rap artist Sister Souljah, whose No Disrespect(1994), which mixes sexual history with political diatribe, is popular in schools countrywide.
In its way, this is a tour de force of black English and underworld slang, as finely tuned to its heroine’s voice as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The subject matter, though, has a certain flashiness, like a black Godfather family saga, and the heroine’s eventual fall develops only glancingly from her character. Born to a 14-year-old mother during one of New York’s worst snowstorms, Winter Santiaga is the teenaged daughter of Ricky Santiaga, Brooklyn’s top drug dealer, who lives like an Arab prince and treats his wife and four daughters like a queen and her princesses. Winter lost her virginity at 12 and now focuses unwaveringly on varieties of adolescent self-indulgence: sex and sugar-daddies, clothes, and getting her own way. She uses school only as a stepping-stone for getting out of the house—after all, nobody’s paying her to go there. But if there’s no money in it, why go? Meanwhile, Daddy decides it’s time to move out of Brooklyn to truly fancy digs on Long Island, though this places him in the discomfiting position of not being absolutely hands-on with his dealers; and sure enough the rise of some young Turks leads to his arrest. Then he does something really stupid: He murders his wife’s two weak brothers in jail with him on Riker’s Island and gets two consecutive life sentences. Winter’s then on her own, especially with Bullet, who may have replaced her dad as top hood, though when she selfishly fails to help her pregnant buddy Simone, there’s worse—much worse—to come.
Thinness aside: riveting stuff, with language so frank it curls your hair.Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-02578-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
