This emotional high-wire act should have readers racing to the end.
A novel plunges a newly acquainted grandfather and granddaughter into adventures on the French canals.
Colin Aylesford of Bath, England, hasn’t seen his son, Michael, in almost 10 years. One day, he receives a letter from his boy stating that Charlotte, his wife, has died in an accident. Delphine, Michael and Charlotte’s 9-year-old daughter, is “coping as well as possible.” More than a month later, Colin learns from the police that Michael has been arrested in France in connection with his wife’s lethal trip down a flight of stairs. He’s also confessed to pushing her. Colin takes the small fishing boat he’s built—the Dragonfly—south, into the French canals. By special arrangement with Charlotte’s mother, Delphine joins him for the summer. The coupling proves exceptionally awkward, because Colin himself is a widower and has lived for years as a bachelor. Delphine is a precocious young lady who requires entertainment and careful attention paid to Amandine, her sock monkey. In prison, meanwhile, Michael reflects on a life spent without his own father after a deep estrangement sundered his parents decades ago. Later on the canals, Colin and Delphine meet Tyler, an American woman traveling alone who soon becomes instrumental in the relationship between Colin and his granddaughter. In this novel of quietly revealed passions, Dunn (Rebecca’s Children, 2016, etc.) gives audiences an experience that resists categorization. It reads like a special sort of coming-of-age tale for parents with either an empty nest or damaged families, in that Colin feels “stranded on the shore of his son’s life.” The pain of not raising his son returns with Delphine, who shares with Michael “the set of her jaw...her wide mouth, and her slightly crooked teeth.” While a good deal of levity is present, especially when Delphine utters her starchy catchphrase, “It is not possible,” Dunn’s story features dense layers of melancholy (Colin “felt sadness like a sharp blade drawn along the length of him”). Sunlight reaches the canals, but not before a gasp-inducing finale.
This emotional high-wire act should have readers racing to the end.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-911501-03-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Aurora Metro Press
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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