Strong and weak, imitative and authentic, by turns.
British author Ross debuts with a Faulkner-like saga of love and hate in a racially divided South—ending it in melodrama staged with blood, tears, and tricks.
Agatha Salisbury, high yellow, never knew her parents—nor why from her early childhood the white Jamie Campbell became so constant a visitor at the house in Edene, North Carolina, that she lived in with her widowed grandfather. Not until the bitter end will it be known who Jamie Campbell really is or what he’s really meant to Agatha—and getting to that end is a route long and indirect. At the opening, the intelligent Agatha has already gone to New York, gotten a degree, worked as a math professor—and then, on her aged grandfather’s death, come back to Edene. There, she takes on the raising of a black boy named Tony Pellar—a mute, it seems, until events show otherwise (and later, otherwise again)—and for income works as housekeeper for the crabby Miss Ezekial, white and also raising a boy, her grandson Mikey Tennyson. These events take place in the ’60s, when “night riders” torment (and sometimes kill) civil rights workers—and when they threaten even Agatha, who secretly helps targeted blacks escape to the north. Much of the story, in flashback, is told by Tony, now in his 30s and eking out a paranoia- and guilt-ridden life in the subway tunnels of New York City. Why his near-psychotic fears, his imagining that Agatha is coming to kill him? Where is Agatha? What did happen to her 30-some years back? In urgent, unpunctuated passages, Tony recalls his old friendship with Mikey, begins to exchange letters with him (Mikey is now a professor himself), and gradually disinters not only the horror of what finally destroyed the courageous Agatha, but, less substantially compelling, a whole batch of romance-style guess-who-was-really-who’s.
Strong and weak, imitative and authentic, by turns.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-22676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
Scouring contemporary insights—in prose as lithe and potent as vines in a rain forest.
Morrison's fine-tuned, high-strung characters this time—black and white Americans caught up together in a "wide and breezy" house on a Caribbean island—may lack the psychic wingspread of Sula or Milkman of Song of Solomon. Yet within the swift of her dazzlingly mythic/animistic fancies, and dialogue sharp as drum raps, they carry her speculations—about black and white relationships and black female identity—as lightly as racing silks. Slim, trim, coolly witty Valerian Street, a retired white Philadelphia candy manufacturer partnered by querulous second wife Margaret (once "Maine's Principal Beauty"), is the wily Prospero for his household of obligated attendants. The strange musics of the island, however, are heard better by the natives—like near-blind Theresa, who knows the island's slave legends. Somewhere in between are Valerian's excellent, elderly black retainers: butler Sidney, starched by his old pride in being "one of the industrious Philadelphia Negroes"; and his wife, Ondine the cook, who nurses swollen feet and curses the Principal Beauty. And the crown of Sidney and Ondine's lives is their stunning niece Jade, to whom Sidney serves food immaculately on silver trays as she dines with Valerian (who financed her superior education abroad). But this delicate assortment of nervous dependencies begins to shiver with the shattering arrival of Son, an unkempt American black man on the run, one of the "undocumented." Valerian, amused by the horror of the household, invites Son as a guest; once cleaned and beautiful, Son begins his courtship of Jade, a woman fearful of a devouring sexuality and a black affirmation. And then, at Christmas dinner, the six of this unlikely peaceable kingdom sit down together only to writhe in a lavaslide of raw, inter-locked revelation and ancient rage. Result: Jade and Son flee to the States, where she—an educated, restless city woman—has a future, while he has only a past: woman-cosseted, woman-dominating. She says: "Mama-spoiled black man, will you mature with me?" He says: "Culture-bearing black woman, whose culture are you bearing?" They try to rescue each other, but their lives cannot mesh: Jade will be a worker, a neuter, rejecting nurturing and heading for Paris; grieving Son will be led by Theresa to a ghostly liberation.
Scouring contemporary insights—in prose as lithe and potent as vines in a rain forest.Pub Date: March 12, 1981
ISBN: 978-0-394-42329-6
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1981
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cha’s storytelling shows how fiction can delicately extract deeper revelations from daily headlines.
A real-life racial incident is transfigured into a riveting thriller about two families’ heartbreaking struggles to confront and transcend rage and loss.
It is the late summer of 2019, but no matter how many years have passed, Shawn Matthews, a black ex-convict now working for a Los Angeles moving company, is burdened by memories of the early spring of 1991, when his teenage sister Ava was shot to death by a Korean woman who mistakenly believed she was stealing from her convenience store. The shooting and the resulting trial—in which the woman was convicted and received no jail time, after which she relocated to another part of LA—fed into racial tensions already festering back then from the Rodney King trial. And the city’s reactions to a present-day shooting death of an unarmed black teen by a police officer indicate that those racial animosities remain close to the boiling point. In the midst of the mounting furor, Grace Park, a young Korean woman, is shaken from her placid good nature by the sight of her mother being wounded in a drive-by shooting. “What if she is being punished?” her sister Miriam says, revealing a shocking fact about their mother's past that Grace hadn't known. An LAPD detective asks Shawn if he has an alibi for the drive-by (which he does). Nonetheless, the most recent shooting upends his fragile sense of security, and he starts to wonder where his cousin, Ray, himself just released from prison, was when Grace’s mother was shot. Cha, author of the Juniper Song series of detective novels (Dead Soon Enough, 2015, etc.), brings what she knows about crafting noir-ish mysteries into this fictionalized treatment of the 1991 Latasha Harlins murder, blending a shrewd knowledge of cutting-edge media and its disruptive impact with a warm, astute sensitivity toward characters of diverse cultures weighed down by converging traumas.
Cha’s storytelling shows how fiction can delicately extract deeper revelations from daily headlines.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-286885-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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