As this novel powerfully illustrates, the terminology has changed but gender discrimination persists.
An early-20th-century Texas refuge for wayward girls inspires a troubled librarian a century later in Kibler’s second novel (Calling Me Home, 2013).
In 2017, Cate moves to Arlington, Texas, mostly, the reader gathers, to escape her past. Employed by the University of Texas as an assistant librarian, Cate becomes obsessed with the musty records of the Berachah Industrial Home, a church-run shelter for women and girls then known as fallen, erring, or wayward—abused women, some pregnant out of wedlock, often forced into prostitution. Cate also visits Berachah’s only remaining vestige, its cemetery. Interspersed with Cate’s story are scenes from early-1900s Berachah, where Mattie, an unwed mother, and Lizzie, who was raped by her stepbrother and deserted by husband and family, relate their experiences in close third-person narration. Mattie’s ailing son dies as she arrives at the home, and her one attempt at prostitution has left her pregnant. Taken in by Berachah along with her young daughter, Lizzie goes through heroin withdrawal. The momentum of the first half of the book is sluggish. Cate’s first-person narrative ranges between the present and 1998 during her senior year in high school. The only daughter of fundamentalist Christians, she is deeply enmeshed in her church community. Much space is devoted to a deceptively anodyne account of falling in love with new classmate River while being asked to the prom by the church golden boy, Seth. In the second half of the book, conflicts finally emerge. For the Berachah girls, it’s Mattie’s bid for independence in Oklahoma City and Lizzie’s ill-advised decision to return home to her mother. A major development in Cate’s teenage life is withheld until later in the book, and readers may question how Cate, as the narrator, could censor her thoughts as to such a crucial revelation. Readers may also question the relevance of the parallel narratives until compelling ironies emerge. Not least of these is the role of fundamentalist Christianity: as rescuer in Berachah’s time, as oppressor in Cate’s.
As this novel powerfully illustrates, the terminology has changed but gender discrimination persists.Pub Date: July 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-49933-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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