by Katherine Namuddu ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
A fascinating exploration of the changing face of social customs and gender politics.
Tradition and social progress collide in this multigenerational tale of Ugandan domestic life.
Set in Uganda in the 1940s and ’50s, Namuddu’s debut novel interweaves the stories of several Ugandan women as they struggle to find and maintain their places in a rapidly changing society. Nansamba leaves her family to enter into a successful, happy marriage with Ggalabuzi, but things become strained when, despite the influence of the Catholic Church, her husband decides to make Nansamba’s younger sister Mucwa his second wife and Nansamba’s “co-wife.” While the two women reconcile and even strategize to make sure they and their children benefit financially from the arrangement, they remain resentful toward their parents, who agreed to Mucwa’s marriage without her consent. Meanwhile, 20-something schoolteacher Biiti, fearful of impending spinsterhood, agrees to a disastrous marriage with an older man she has never met; ultimately, she’s compelled to take her young child and return to her parents’ home, eventually making a career for herself as a nightclub manager. When the spurned matchmaker Ssolo, who engineered both Nansamba’s marriage and Mucwa’s nonconsensual betrothal to Ggalabuzi, seeks revenge upon him by arranging the seduction of one of Biiti’s relations, many women’s lives become knotted together in a struggle for dominance and security. Only when the younger women caught in the drama assert their independence do the dynamics of power begin to seismically shift. Namuddu’s intriguing depiction of midcentury Ugandan society is one of contrasts. The increasing influence of orthodox Christianity contends with firmly entrenched pagan beliefs, such as those that revolve around the birth and consecration of the many sets of twins born in the novel, while women sold into marriages and rendered legally powerless must scramble and connive, often to each other’s detriment. Convoluted plotlines involving unlikely couplings, mysterious parentage and sudden revelations help further the sense of chaos and claustrophobia Namuddu tries to create, but such developments become tiresome as they grow increasingly melodramatic.
A fascinating exploration of the changing face of social customs and gender politics.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Partridge Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2018
A tour de force.
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New York Times Bestseller
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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