Manifest Destiny meets magic realism.
Ripe with symbolism, conspiratorial metaphors and fabulist intents, Saknussemm's third novel (Private Midnight, 2009, etc.) is an allegorical American frontier experience.
It's the 1840s, and Hephaestus Sitturd, son of an itinerant Baptist preacher and a half-Shawnee woman, marries Rapture Meadhorn, whose escaped slave grandfather was a Creole Gullah from the Carolina sea islands. Rapture is an herbalist and healer, valued in the wilderness community of Zanesville, Ohio, but Hephaestus is a tinkerer, intent on building a Time Ark to confront the end-of-the-world prophecies of one William Miller. To the pair is born Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd, a preternatural genius. At age six, he speaks multiple languages, solves complicated mathematical problems and constructs assorted airships. Dogged by debts and persecuted by bigots, the trio sets out for Amarillo to join Micah Jefferson Sitturd, Hephaestus' half brother, a former Texas Ranger. And thus begins a trek, not Pilgrim's Progress, not an Odyssey, but rather a tropological literary journey down the Ohio to Porkopolis (Cincinnati), across to St. Louis and up the Missouri to Independence. Along the way Lloyd meets Henri St. Ives, a gambler with a fantastical mechanical hand, Professor Mulrooney, married to identical twins who serve as assistants in his traveling medicine show, Urim and Thurimmun, microcephalics deposited in Illinois by a tornado, an underground oracle, and possible agents of the Spirosians and the Vardogers, two secret societies. There's time for Lloyd to fall in love with Hattie, a runaway slave, and attempt interpretation of the scripture of the Quists, a persecuted religious sect. Despite the fabulist plot, Saknussemm's imagination and narrative skills hold the adventure together. Written in connected sequences, the book opens with a surrealistic prologue set in 1869. A young lieutenant on a Great Plains mapping mission observes a man mounted on a mule holding a white gyrfalcon. Is it Lloyd? Readers can only imagine, for the book ends as the Sitturd party sets out from Independence toward Texas.
Manifest Destiny meets magic realism.Pub Date: March 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7417-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
Young Starla is an endearing character whose spirited observations propel this nicely crafted story.
Crandall (Sleep No More, 2010, etc.) delivers big with a coming-of-age story set in Mississippi in 1963 and narrated by a precocious 9-year-old.
Due in part to tradition, intimidation and Jim Crow laws, segregation is very much ingrained into the Southern lifestyle in 1963. Few white children question these rules, least of all Starla Caudelle, a spunky young girl who lives with her stern, unbending grandmother in Cayuga Springs, Miss., and spends an inordinate amount of time on restriction for her impulsive actions and sassy mouth. Starla’s dad works on an oil rig in the Gulf; her mother abandoned the family to seek fame and fortune in Nashville when Starla was 3. In her youthful innocence, Starla’s convinced that her mother’s now a big singing star, and she dreams of living with her again one day, a day that seems to be coming more quickly than Starla’s anticipated. Convinced that her latest infraction is about to land her in reform school, Starla decides she has no recourse but to run away from home and head to Nashville to find her mom. Ill prepared for the long, hot walk and with little concept of time and distance, Starla becomes weak and dehydrated as she trudges along the hot, dusty road. She gladly accepts water and a ride from Eula, a black woman driving an old truck, and finds, to her surprise, that she’s not Eula’s only passenger. Inside a basket is a young white baby, an infant supposedly abandoned outside a church, whom Eula calls James. Although Eula doesn’t intend to drive all the way to Nashville, when she shows up at her home with the two white children, a confrontation with her husband forces her into becoming a part of Starla’s journey, and it’s this journey that creates strong bonds between the two: They help each other face fears as they each become stronger individuals. Starla learns firsthand about the abuse and scare tactics used to intimidate blacks and the skewed assumption of many whites that blacks are inferior beings. Assisted by a black schoolteacher who shows Eula and Starla unconditional acceptance and kindness, both ultimately learn that love and kinship transcend blood ties and skin color.
Young Starla is an endearing character whose spirited observations propel this nicely crafted story.Pub Date: July 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-0772-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.
High adventure fraught with cliffhanger twists marks this runaway-slave narrative, which leaps, sails, and soars from Caribbean cane fields to the fringes of the frozen Arctic and across a whole ocean.
It's 1830 on the island of Barbados, and a 12-year-old slave named George Washington Black wakes up every hot morning to cruelties administered to him and other black men, women, and children toiling on a sugar plantation owned by the coldblooded Erasmus Wilde. Christopher, one of Erasmus’ brothers, is a flamboyant oddball with insatiable curiosity toward scientific matters and enlightened views on social progress. Upon first encountering young Wash, Christopher, also known as Titch, insists on acquiring him from his brother as his personal valet and research assistant. Neither Erasmus nor Wash is pleased by this transaction, and one of the Wildes' cousins, the dour, mysterious Philip, is baffled by it. But then Philip kills himself in Wash’s presence, and Christopher, knowing the boy will be unjustly blamed and executed for the death, activates his hot air balloon, the Cloud-cutter, to carry both himself and Wash northward into a turbulent storm. So begins one of the most unconventional escapes from slavery ever chronicled as Wash and Titch lose their balloon but are carried the rest of the way to America by a ship co-captained by German-born twins of wildly differing temperaments. Once in Norfolk, Virginia, they meet with a sexton with a scientific interest in dead tissue and a moral interest in ferrying other runaway slaves through the Underground Railroad. Rather than join them on their journey, Wash continues to travel with Titch for a reunion with the Wildes' father, an Arctic explorer, north of Canada. Their odyssey takes even more unexpected turns, and soon Wash finds himself alone and adrift in the unfamiliar world as “a disfigured black boy with a scientific turn of mind…running, always running from the dimmest of shadows.” Canadian novelist Edugyan (Half-Blood Blues, 2012, etc.) displays as much ingenuity and resourcefulness as her main characters in spinning this yarn, and the reader’s expectations are upended almost as often as her hero’s.
A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52142-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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