Ahl writes with an intensity that never quite goes over the line into melodrama, although it comes close at times, and her...
Quirky but appealing debut about a young woman who returns to her childhood home in Africa to set some family ghosts to rest.
Anthropologist Elena Monroe is having some trouble finding herself. She grew up in Africa, where her stepfather researched polio and smallpox vaccines while her mother photographed elephants for conservation groups. Now she lives in New Mexico and tells everyone her mother died in 1975. But her boyfriend Michael, who lost his parents as a teenager and thinks they have that in common, one day meets Elena’s mother leaning on her car in Albuquerque. Why did Elena lie to him? Good question, especially after Elena packs up and leaves for Kenya the next day to visit her mother’s grave. In 1975, when Elena was only nine, East Africa was in the throes of an ivory craze, as skyrocketing prices combined with conservation laws to fuel a thriving black market in elephant tusks. Elena’s mother set out to document the poaching cartels that rampaged through the bush in search of big profits from illegal safaris, and she soon found herself in the middle of a mob war of sorts, in which the legal boundaries separating the mobsters from the militias from the cabinet ministers were all but erased. We know that the young Elena saw someone killed during an elephant shoot; we also know that someone is buried beneath her mother’s tombstone. It will take some doing to disentangle the rest of the facts from this intentionally snarled narrative, but that doesn’t dampen the fire here. Maybe after Elena sorts it all out she can come home and get on with her life—if she’s lucky.
Ahl writes with an intensity that never quite goes over the line into melodrama, although it comes close at times, and her evocation of Kenya is impressionistic and moving without being manipulative or touristy.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-56689-154-X
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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