A gritty novel that unflinchingly depicts the ravages of drug abuse.
A heroin addict overdoses, loses custody of her kids, and then tries to rebuild her life in this debut novel.
When she was only 15, Aleisha Turner had her first child and had no choice but to drop out of school to tend to him. She’s largely estranged from her family and has no support system, so she finds moments of escape in heroin. To finance the habit that ravages her body and mind, she works as a prostitute on the streets of downtown Toledo, Ohio. She eventually finds herself with three kids and an abusive husband. After she accidentally overdoses, the state takes her children away; the two eldest are placed in foster care, and the youngest, a baby, is taken in by Aleisha’s aunt. Aleisha is forced to enlist in a rehabilitation program, but she initially refuses to take therapy seriously; she’s overwhelmed by her hopeless worldview and has a reflexive suspicion of people who show her compassion. However, she eventually begins to make progress and clean up her life. She moves in with her older sister, Kareen Turner, and her live-in boyfriend, Leroy Jackson. But after Leroy takes a sexual interest in her, Kareen jealously throws her out, which sets her on yet another downward spiral. Meanwhile, Beverly Stone, a court-appointed special advocate, gets tasked with overseeing the care and custody of Aleisha’s children. After tragically losing her own husband in an accident, Beverly immersed herself in volunteer work and became a witness to a dark world of addiction and emotional squalor. Author Julius artfully depicts government programs that try to rescue society’s most beleaguered but inadvertently debase them at the same time. For example, when Aleisha realizes that she needs to be watched while providing a urine sample for a drug test, Julius ruefully observes the unavoidable humiliation: “Aleisha nearly said something, pointing out how demeaning the whole thing was, then realized the futility of it all. This was how the system worked so this was what needed to be done.” The prose is clear and sometimes haunting, and the story gives readers the possibility of redemption without delivering a neat, saccharine conclusion. This is a heartbreaking but authentically realistic story, told without proselytizing embellishment.
A gritty novel that unflinchingly depicts the ravages of drug abuse.Pub Date: June 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9969607-2-4
Page Count: 314
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Thoroughbreds and Virginia blue-bloods cavort, commit murder, and fall in love in Roberts's (Hidden Riches, 1994, etc.) latest romantic thriller — this one set in the world of championship horse racing. Rich, sheltered Kelsey Byden is recovering from a recent divorce when she receives a letter from her mother, Naomi, a woman she has believed dead for over 20 years. When Kelsey confronts her genteel English professor father, though, he sheepishly confesses that, no, her mother isn't dead; throughout Kelsey's childhood, she was doing time for the murder of her lover. Kelsey meets with Naomi and not only finds her quite charming, but the owner of Three Willows, one of the most splendid horse farms in Virginia. Kelsey is further intrigued when she meets Gabe Slater, a blue-eyed gambling man who owns a neighboring horse farm; when one of Gabe's horses is mated with Naomi's, nostrils flare, flanks quiver, and the romance is on. Since both Naomi and Gabe have horses entered in the Kentucky Derby, Kelsey is soon swept into the whirlwind of the Triple Crown, in spite of her family's objections to her reconciliation with the notorious Naomi. The rivalry between the two horse farms remains friendly, but other competitors — one of them is Gabe's father, a vicious alcoholic who resents his son's success — prove less scrupulous. Bodies, horse and human, start piling up, just as Kelsey decides to investigate the murky details of her mother's crime. Is it possible she was framed? The ground is thick with no-goods, including haughty patricians, disgruntled grooms, and jockeys with tragic pasts, but despite all the distractions, the identity of the true culprit behind the mayhem — past and present — remains fairly obvious. The plot lopes rather than races to the finish. Gambling metaphors abound, and sexual doings have a distinctly equine tone. But Roberts's style has a fresh, contemporary snap that gets the story past its own worst excesses.
Pub Date: June 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14059-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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