A haunting and poignant reflection on grief, spirituality, and the loving bonds that provide guidance and sustenance.
Folk offers a complex novel that gradually reveals the individual and intertwined stories of several women.
Fifteen-year-old Samantha, in first-person narration, begins this mystical, often ethereal, tale about relationships in 1986, the final year of the novel’s chronology. As the book opens, she and her mother, Mira, are visiting her mom’s younger sister, Etta—the eponymous Aphrodite. Etta gives Sam a blank journal to help her sort out her feelings of teenage angst; however, much of her writing will be about her intriguing aunt. Mira is the more traditional of the two sisters, while Etta is the almost-free spirit who defies convention. She’s now living with Patrick, an artist who considers her his “muse.” After years of distress over Etta’s free lifestyle, Mira has finally come to accept her sister for who she is. But there is more sorrow to come: Mira, who’s still mourning the death of her mother, is about to experience another devastating loss. The narrative undertakes a back-and-forth jog through the previous two decades. Third-person narration, which alternates with Samantha’s voice, fills in the early years of Etta’s back story, beginning in 1968 and running through the 1970s. Leaping forward again to 1986, readers meet Mira and Sam’s neighbor, Joan, whose teenage daughter, Elise, disappeared 10 years ago; Joan tells Sam that Elise usually visits in the spring, and readers learn through Joan’s and Elise’s back stories that these visits are spiritual apparitions. Folk, the author of Totem Beasts (2017), peppers her artfully composed story with religious and mythological references. The coastal Massachusetts setting effectively frames one of her themes: the mystery, majesty, and inspirational magic of the sea and its creatures. The frequent switching of time frames and back stories is structurally interesting, even if it also adversely affects the pacing of the narrative. In the end, however, what at first appear to be separate tales coalesce, and it’s revealed that it is young Samantha who, through her words and art, will carry forward the legacy of Etta—“the goddess we’ve left behind.”
A haunting and poignant reflection on grief, spirituality, and the loving bonds that provide guidance and sustenance.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59954-150-1
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Bordighera Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.
Edgy humor and fierce imagery coexist in these stories with shrewd characterization and humane intelligence, inspired by volatile material sliced off the front pages.
The state of race relations in post-millennial America haunts most of the stories in this debut collection. Yet Adjei-Brenyah brings to what pundits label our “ongoing racial dialogue” a deadpan style, an acerbic perspective, and a wicked imagination that collectively upend readers’ expectations. “The Finkelstein 5,” the opener, deals with the furor surrounding the murder trial of a white man claiming self-defense in slaughtering five black children with a chainsaw. The story is as prickly in its view toward black citizens seeking their own justice as it is pitiless toward white bigots pressing for an acquittal. An even more caustic companion story, “Zimmer Land,” is told from the perspective of an African-American employee of a mythical theme park whose white patrons are encouraged to act out their fantasies of dispensing brutal justice to people of color they regard as threatening on sight, or “problem solving," as its mission statement calls it. Such dystopian motifs recur throughout the collection: “The Era,” for example, identifies oppressive class divisions in a post-apocalyptic school district where self-esteem seems obtainable only through regular injections of a controlled substance called “Good.” The title story, meanwhile, riotously reimagines holiday shopping as the blood-spattered zombie movie you sometimes fear it could be in real life. As alternately gaudy and bleak as such visions are, there’s more in Adjei-Brenyah’s quiver besides tough-minded satire, as exhibited in “The Lion & the Spider,” a tender coming-of-age story cleverly framed in the context of an African fable.
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-91124-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
A delightful and surprising story of a woman drawn through life by curiosity.
Time is fractured in this story of a woman’s life as a child, college student, and 20-something set against the development of the atomic bomb and efforts to land the first man on the moon.
When Annie Fisk was a child growing up in New Mexico, she had a best friend, Diana, who would appear and disappear in her backyard. A number of small trinkets appeared and disappeared in the same way. As Annie grew up, she decided her friend must have been imaginary, and she never told her mother or her father—a physicist working on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos—about it. After her father’s death and her graduation from high school, Annie headed to college in San Antonio, where she met and fell in love with Evelyn, a fellow college student with dreams of being a painter. But, drawn by an imaginary thread, Annie leaves Evelyn after graduation to move to Houston, with the goal of working for NASA. And she does—starting as a secretary, and then moving into programming. What begins as a straightforward story veers into science fiction territory almost unexpectedly as Annie discovers a wormhole and begins to research and test the implications of that finding with a colleague. Explorations of love, loss, science, and the edges of the universe and what is—and is not—possible in the space-time continuum collide in this story; it's reminiscent of the thoughtfulness, matter-of-fact science, and female strength of Connie Willis’ well-known time traveling series beginning with Doomsday Book (1992) as well as the world portrayed in Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures (2016).
A delightful and surprising story of a woman drawn through life by curiosity.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9780593543887
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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