An exuberant narrator, a conjure woman, and a pirate-mad white suitor enliven this tale.
Fifth in a series of children’s books, this fictional diary recounts how a widow’s mystical sessions affect a 13-year-old slave girl’s family.
Beginning in June 1725, Camellia Cassandra writes in her diary that “nothing exciting ain’t NEVER going to happen on this here New Ashley Hall plantation!” (Her literacy, or how she got a diary, isn’t explained.) Most of the North Carolina plantation’s 43 slaves labor in the fields, but when Camellia and her two sisters get a chance to serve in the Big House, they soon discover it’s harder work than dusting a few knickknacks. Pansy Pearl, the runt, is tasked with looking after the Hightowers’ sickly baby. Then, when the plantation gets visitors—Jimbo Studebaker is courting Miss Charlene Hightower—Camellia and Myrtle Millicent are brought in to clean bedrooms and look after the guests. Though the girls no longer have to fear leeches and gators, they’re more directly under the thumbs of their white owners. If the marriage comes off, the siblings will be separated and Camellia will have to leave behind her boyfriend, Barn Boy Jesse. But when the white folks ask Ole Widow Brown, reputed to be an Obeah woman, to raise spirits of the dead, Jimbo seems more interested in pirate ghosts than his intended. Can the wedding be stopped? McWilliams (Diary of a Black Seminole Girl, Ebony Noel, 2016, etc.) writes in an entertaining, vivacious voice that’s much the same from book to book, full of capitalized words, multiple exclamation points, dialect, and many sentences beginning with “That’s when.” Although the indignities of slavery underlie the novel’s plot, Camellia’s irrepressible sense of fun stands up to them well. Widow Brown’s conjuring sessions provide much amusement. Stede Bonnet speaks: “I grow weary and wants to go back to the here and beyond where I gots BLUE SKY, WHITE CLOUDS, PURTY ANGELS, and PEACE from WHITE BOYS what think they knowd ’bout PIRATES!” An author’s note provides more information on slave narratives.
An exuberant narrator, a conjure woman, and a pirate-mad white suitor enliven this tale.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 343
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A smooth blend of suspense and romance. As ever, the author's trademark effortless style keeps a complex plot moving without...
Megaselling Roberts (River's End, 1999, etc.) goes to Napa Valley for the tale of an Italian-American family wine producers rocked by scandal and a series of murders.
Dynasty head Tereza Giambelli knows that her granddaughter Sophia is the only family member capable of running a multimillion-dollar wine business—and no one contradicts La Signora. It's just as well the lovely young woman is still single: Tereza has plans for her. The matriarch has recently married Eli MacMillan, the American founder of another famous wine company. Eli's grandson Tyler knows everything there is to know about producing wine, from the vineyard to the vat. Ruggedly handsome, intelligent and earthy, he's a perfect match for public-relations whiz Sophia—or so thinks Tereza. The two young people begin to work together; Tyler teaches Sophia the fine art of making wine and making love. But other family members hope to claim their share of the Giambelli fortune, and people start dying mysteriously, including Sophia's good-for-nothing father, Tony Avano. Long divorced from long-suffering Pilar Giambelli, Tony led an opulent, self-indulgent life that provides plenty of murder suspects. He might have been killed by the mob, or a jealous mistress, or his spoiled brother-in-law, Tereza's lazy son, who's produced a passel of brats with his foolish Italian wife in the hopes of making Tereza happy. Everyone has a motive, and nothing is what it seems, Sophia discovers, but Tyler stands by her. Then a bottle of tainted merlot kills a company exec. A tragic mishap caused by poisonous plants growing near the vines? Or deliberate product tampering intended to destroy the company? Sophia and Tyler will need to delve even deeper into the convoluted and sometimes unsavory history of the family and its three-generation business.
A smooth blend of suspense and romance. As ever, the author's trademark effortless style keeps a complex plot moving without a hitch.Pub Date: March 19, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14712-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature.
When the four adult Madigan children come home for Christmas to visit their widowed mother for the last time before the family house is sold, a familiar landscape of tensions is renewed and reordered.
Newly chosen as Ireland’s first fiction laureate, Enright (The Forgotten Waltz, 2012, etc.) showcases the unostentatious skill that underpins her success and popularity in this latest story of place and connection, set in an unnamed community in County Clare. Rosaleen Considine married beneath her when she took the hand of Pat Madigan decades ago. Their four children are now middle-aged, and only one of them, Constance, stayed local, marrying into the McGrath family, which has benefited comfortably from the nation’s financial boom. Returning to the fold are Dan, originally destined for the priesthood, now living in Toronto, gay and “a raging blank of a human being”; Emmet, the international charity worker struggling with attachment; and Hanna, the disappointed actress with a drinking problem. This is prime Enright territory, the fertile soil of home and history, cash and clan; or, in the case of the Madigan reunion, “all the things that were unsayable: failure, money, sex and drink.” Long introductions to the principal characters precede the theatrical format of the reunion, allowing Enright plenty of space to convey her brilliant ear for dialogue, her soft wit, and piercing, poetic sense of life’s larger abstractions. Like Enright's Man Booker Prize–winning The Gathering (2007), this novel traces experience across generations although, despite a brief crisis, this is a less dramatic story, while abidingly generous and humane.
A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature.Pub Date: May 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24821-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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