Thai’s voice establishes all the depth of character there is here, the supporting cast existing mainly to prompt him toward...
Minus the hip-hop window-dressing and sprinklings of rap names, Jasper’s debut is only a desultory rendering of a young man’s journey to maturity.
Nineteen-year-old Thai Williams—the brightest among his friends—passes his days in school, on his job, and hanging with his friends in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Then one day he walks in on his girlfriend grinding it out with a stranger named Nick, whom he later catches up with at a party. While he’s chasing Nick, a gun ends up in Thai’s hands, goes off, and a bullet lodges in Nick’s skull. Believing himself a felon on the run, Thai lights out for Charlotte, North Carolina, where he lays low with Enrique (“E”). From the old neighborhood, E has made an enviable new start: he has a job with his mother in real estate, a sweet periwinkle Jeep, and a “rich girl” who respects herself. After some time with E, Thai ends up partying with white people—they’re unexpectedly friendly—befriending a troubled girl named Alicia, and making occasional love with neighboring flight attendant Robin. Alicia, recently through an abortion, is still tangled up with a mean boyfriend who unsurprisingly clobbers Thai a couple of times in warning. Robin, meanwhile, encourages Thai to be his own man. E’s mother, whose business is thriving, even offers him a job and the chance to enter college. What’s not to like? Yet Thai comes to understand that in his previous environment, his irresponsible friends in effect conditioned him to murder Nick. So he goes to church, gets right with God and his father, learns some truths about his past, and heads back home to clean things up in D.C. before going on to whatever next stage in his life may follow.
Thai’s voice establishes all the depth of character there is here, the supporting cast existing mainly to prompt him toward his next insight. Still, this 25-year-old author shows a talent that could blossom in another, more challenging, book.Pub Date: June 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-7679-0707-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
