Davenport has skill, but her novel falters.
Davenport’s sometimes evocative, often rambling third novel (Song of the Exile, 1999, etc.) is a portrait of a Hawaiian woman struggling against poverty and loneliness.
Young Ana Kapakahi, motherless and haphazardly cared for by a large extended family, is just another “illegitimate” in a house filled with fierce women, their children and a cadre of old men silenced by war. Angry and emotionally crippled after she is deserted by her mother, Anahola, Ana flirts with the rough life on the Wai’anae Coast. Babies, drugs, gang shootings, the lure of beautiful brown boys—it’s all out there waiting. But with cousin Rosie’s encouragement, Ana does well in school, and with the financial support of Anahola (her visits are infrequent, but her checks are regular), she becomes an emergency-room doctor. Anahola abandoned Ana for a life on the mainland, where she found Max, a scientist working in immunology. Anahola becomes Max’s research assistant, and the two travel the globe lecturing on the dangers of radiation poisoning. Davenport flimsily connects this to the other characters—Ana’s favorite cousin Lopaka begins protesting the munitions testing on Oahu, a loved one dies of radiation exposure, and so on. Though Davenport’s language and imagery is often lovely, the over-extended themes (the erosion of traditional Hawaiian ways, the dangers of the nuclear age, the corruption of the new Russia) take the reader far away from Ana.
Davenport has skill, but her novel falters.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-48150-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
It's all quite entertaining and memorable.
Here, Follett sets the thrillers aside for a long, steady story about building a cathedral in 12th-century England.
Bloodthirsty or adventure-crazed Follett readers will be frustrated, but anyone who has ever been moved by the splendors of a fine church will sink right into this highly detailed but fast-moving historical work—a novel about the people and skills needed to put up an eye-popping cathedral in the very unsettled days just before the ascension of Henry II. The cathedral is the brainchild of Philip, prior of the monastery at Kingsbridge, and Tom, an itinerant master mason. Philip, shrewd and ambitious but genuinely devout, sees it as a sign of divine agreement when his decrepit old cathedral burns on the night that Tom and his starving family show up seeking shelter. Actually, it's Tom's clever stepson Jack who has stepped in to carry out God's will by secretly torching the cathedral attic, but the effect is the same. Tom gets the commission to start the rebuilding—which is what he has wanted to do more than anything in his life. Meanwhile, however, the work is complicated greatly by local politics. There is a loathsome baron and his family who have usurped the local earldom and allied themselves with the powerful, cynical bishop—who is himself sinfully jealous of Philip's cathedral. There are the dispossessed heirs to earldom, a beautiful girl and her bellicose brother, both sworn to root out the usurpers. And there is the mysterious Ellen, Tom's second wife, who witnessed an ancient treachery that haunts the bishop, the priory, and the vile would-be earl. The great work is set back, and Tom is killed in a raid by the rivals. It falls to young Jack to finish the work. Thriller writing turns out to be pretty good training, since Follett's history moves like a fast freight train. Details are plenty, but they support rather than smother.
It's all quite entertaining and memorable.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1989
ISBN: 0451225244
Page Count: 973
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1989
BOOK TO SCREEN
A meandering and didactic family saga by Chickasaw poet, novelist, and essayist Hogan (Dwellings, p. 835; Mean Spirit, 1990), a tale that attemptsÖ la Little Big Manto rewrite the history of the American West from a Native American perspective. At 17, Angela Jensen decides that it's time to untangle her family, a process she begins by going hometo a remote village in western Canada called Adam's Rib, a place she no longer even recognizes. Angela looks up Agnes Iron, her great-grandmother, whom she's never met, and is soon introduced to Bush, who looked after Angela's deranged mother, Hannah, and raised Angela herself after Hannah's early death. At first, it is information about her motherstories, accounts, explanationsthat most interests Angela, but eventually she understands that the history of her family is woven tightly into the history of her family's tribe and the bloody strife that has colored their lives ever since the white men came among them: ``For us, hell was cleared forests and killed animals. But for them, hell was this world in all its plenitude.'' The troubles have been carried down to the present day, except that now the threat is comprised not of missionaries and European settlers but of government authorities who want to develop the land out of existence through the construction of a mammoth hydroelectric power plant. As her consciousness is raised, Angela begins to recognize her real identity but desires, and the anger that she labors under throughoutand that finds expression mainly in the crudest caricatures of Western culture and North American history imaginableis relieved by the happy fulfillment of her romantic (rather than political) life: a fairy-tale marriage that seems in this terrain to be even more out-of-place than the dam would have been. Tediously obvious and overwritten; Hogan's characters are so excruciatingly limited to the representation of their cultures that they become little more than allegories, reducing the tale to agitprop.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-81227-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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