As McCafferty’s preface declares, “The Irish perspective is important to the history of resistance to colonialism.” For that...
Surefire dramatic material and a hauntingly exotic setting are the most striking features of this debut historical about an Irish girl kidnapped, sold into slavery, and later involved in a failed rebellion against the “plantocracy” that exploits black and white victims alike.
The time is the later 17th century, and she who “testifies” is middle-aged Cot Quashey (born Daley), under interrogation by Peter Coote, an “Apothecary-Doctor” also employed as an investigator by the governor of Barbados. As the priggish, thoughtlessly elitist and racist Coote prompts her impatiently, Cot relates the details of her abduction (when she was only ten years old), passage to the West Indies on an overcrowded, stinking “slaver,” and twenty-plus years at two sugar plantations, where black African and “dispensable” white slaves labored together, cutting cane and enduring forced cohabitation (“The breeding was an extra duty after a full day in the fields”). Cot’s piecemeal tale rises frequently to rhapsodic heights as she recalls the births and losses of her children, and particularly her unexpectedly happy marriage to “Quashey the Coromantee,” a black African Muslim regarded as “a man of rank among the bondsfolk” whose elaborate plan to liberate the slaves is brutally put down—yet not before Cot is implicated in the “crime,” for which she’ll never stop paying. It’s an engrossing story, bolstered by an impressive wealth of carefully researched period detail. But it all flashes by too quickly, and McCafferty’s very pointed references to Cot’s descent from a family of “seanachies” (i.e., bards) do little to dispel the reader’s growing sense that the character’s voice is an unconvincingly literate stand-in for the author’s, doling out exposition and compacted narrative as if conducting a history lesson. And, once Cot’s story reaches the events of the revolt itself, they’re presented in inexplicably abrupt summary form.
As McCafferty’s preface declares, “The Irish perspective is important to the history of resistance to colonialism.” For that reason alone, Testimony is well worth reading—though it’s not nearly as wonderful as it might have been.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03065-1
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
Rather than settle for a coming-of-age or travails-of-immigrants story, Hosseini has folded them both into this searing...
Here’s a real find: a striking debut from an Afghan now living in the US. His passionate story of betrayal and redemption is framed by Afghanistan’s tragic recent past.
Moving back and forth between Afghanistan and California, and spanning almost 40 years, the story begins in Afghanistan in the tranquil 1960s. Our protagonist Amir is a child in Kabul. The most important people in his life are Baba and Hassan. Father Baba is a wealthy Pashtun merchant, a larger-than-life figure, fretting over his bookish weakling of a son (the mother died giving birth); Hassan is his sweet-natured playmate, son of their servant Ali and a Hazara. Pashtuns have always dominated and ridiculed Hazaras, so Amir can’t help teasing Hassan, even though the Hazara staunchly defends him against neighborhood bullies like the “sociopath” Assef. The day, in 1975, when 12-year-old Amir wins the annual kite-fighting tournament is the best and worst of his young life. He bonds with Baba at last but deserts Hassan when the latter is raped by Assef. And it gets worse. With the still-loyal Hassan a constant reminder of his guilt, Amir makes life impossible for him and Ali, ultimately forcing them to leave town. Fast forward to the Russian occupation, flight to America, life in the Afghan exile community in the Bay Area. Amir becomes a writer and marries a beautiful Afghan; Baba dies of cancer. Then, in 2001, the past comes roaring back. Rahim, Baba’s old business partner who knows all about Amir’s transgressions, calls from Pakistan. Hassan has been executed by the Taliban; his son, Sohrab, must be rescued. Will Amir wipe the slate clean? So he returns to the hell of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and reclaims Sohrab from a Taliban leader (none other than Assef) after a terrifying showdown. Amir brings the traumatized child back to California and a bittersweet ending.
Rather than settle for a coming-of-age or travails-of-immigrants story, Hosseini has folded them both into this searing spectacle of hard-won personal salvation. All this, and a rich slice of Afghan culture too: irresistible.Pub Date: June 2, 2003
ISBN: 1-57322-245-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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