A touching tale of two people from different times, both trying to keep their splintering families together.
After her uncle dies in the attacks on 9/11, a tough Brooklyn teen moves to Virginia and connects across time with a boy whose family has been divided by the Civil War.
When 16-year-old Julia McKinley’s uncle Denny died on 9/11, her mother fell apart. Unable to keep living a normal life without her beloved twin brother, her mother’s solution is to leave New York, rent an old house in rural Virginia and drown her emotions in copious amounts of wine. Julia accompanies her in an attempt to provide support, leaving her father, younger brother and close friends behind to start her senior year of high school down South. Frustrated by her mother’s insistence on spending less time with her than at the bottom of a glass, Julia ends up spending a great deal of time in the house’s cellar, where she encounters a teenage boy named Elias. He’s not a ghost; he’s all too alive, just in another time period. While Julia tries to piece together her family, torn apart by terrorism, Elias, in the middle of the Civil War, hopes to reunite his Southern separatist brother with his Union-leaning father. Seemingly fated to meet in order to help each other cope, Julia and Elias grow to rely on their daily heart-to-hearts in the cellar, to the point that Julia’s growing love for someone stuck in the 19th century threatens to prevent her from fostering relationships with people in the modern world. The premise sounds straight out of Doctor Who, but rather than focus on the wild sci-fi aspects of her story, debut author Lo focuses on the emotions. What results in a far more realistic, mature look at human relationships than readers might expect from a story with such an unbelievable plot twist. A great deal of credit goes to Julia’s smart, tough narration, which keeps the story grounded in reality. She’s a funny, flawed heroine whom readers of all ages will identify with and admire.
A touching tale of two people from different times, both trying to keep their splintering families together.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Lanterna Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
A bold, exhausting but highly rewarding experiment in stripping away the illusory world in search of only the most essential...
A carefully structured collection of abstract and conceptual poetry concerned with the nature of reality and relationships.
Raben’s first book-length offering may better be termed a project than a collection, and an ambitious one at that. Composed of 10 thematically distinct chapters, the volume offers a complex, nonlinear structure in which tightly entwined images, phrases and themes from each of the seemingly self-contained chapters shoot out tendrils that loop and coil themselves around the stalks of neighboring chapters. Insistently recursive and nonnarrative, the poems, taken together, read not unlike an untended villanelle gone to seed. There may not be a story, but there’s rhythm and a message. Amid it all, Raben’s voice is eminently postmodern; in addition to recursion and fragmentation, she employs highly irregular, subtle rhyme and meter, while working with short but richly syllable-dense lines. Her characters and perspectives shift frequently, exploring the same question from first-, second- and third-person, sometimes in a matter of a few lines. Time, her narrators understand, is relative—“for a moment we were the same / as we had always been / then the hours became shorter / and the second loses time”—but so too are constructed identities: “I allowed my eyes / to be painted on / chiseled and chipped / it’s harder to undo a life / made from stone.” In her most direct philosophical statements, Raben strikes a Whitmanesque chord: “We are the paint that / makes the painting / not the mind / and not the hand / we are the very stuff of life / together on the sand.” While sharing some philosophical ground with Whitman (though Raben ultimately evinces more pessimism), she evokes Alice Fulton in her abstractions and, at times, calls to mind Charles Simic’s surrealism. Occasionally, the abstractness crosses over into abstruseness, and despite the many elements of its larger structure, the collection feels incomplete. Still, Raben has a solidly crafted, enjoyable and appropriately challenging debut.
A bold, exhausting but highly rewarding experiment in stripping away the illusory world in search of only the most essential qualities of the human experience.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456851538
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An impressive novel about the subtle prejudice and blatant bigotry faced by black men and women in this country.
In Malone’s novel, an Ivy-League educated black man struggles to overcome racism in 1980s Washington, D.C.
Raised to be oblivious to race by his parents, Brandon Northcross truly believed racism was an issue of the past, defeated by the civil rights movement in the 1960s. As one of the only black students in his Dartmouth MBA program, he remains purposefully ignorant of any racism directed at him, assuming job rejections after face-to-face interviews are the result of his own deficiencies rather than thinly veiled discrimination practiced by recruiters. He is elated to land a job beneath his ability at a company with so-called progressive hiring practices. He shines in his new position and his career begins to take off despite the insinuations from his colleagues that he was only hired to fill affirmative-action quotas. Unfortunately, a hateful plan is hatched to get him fired which he, frustratingly, is too traumatized to fight. So begins Brandon’s journey to understand racism and where he fits as a black man in the business world. Though he viscerally experiences depression and hopelessness, Brandon is an inspirational character. He always manages to reeducate and rebuild himself, becoming a proud community leader. From the shut-in elderly man who collects African artifacts to the jazz musicians who introduce Brandon to Miles Davis, Malone uses secondary characters in Brandon’s journey to indirectly educate readers on black history. Some of these ancillary characters come across as very natural additions to Brandon’s life, while others feel slightly forced. The pace is at times hampered by superfluous and contrived dialogue. However, the haunting conclusion more than makes up for the plodding sections of the story.
An impressive novel about the subtle prejudice and blatant bigotry faced by black men and women in this country.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 978-0966392609
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Azure Pub
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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