This is for readers who love a slow, methodical reveal.
Moore’s latest novel (Heft, 2012, etc.) deals with the debilitating effects of memory loss on a father and his young daughter, using a computer program as a powerful aid for uncovering a seemingly lost family history.
Ada Sibelius is 12 when she first notices a change in her father, the brilliant head of a computer science laboratory in 1980s Boston: “She could not articulate what was different in his demeanor, but it triggered a deep-seated uneasiness in her.” Ada’s childhood hasn’t been normal; her home schooling takes place at the lab, where she goes each day with David, as well as through puzzles that test the knowledge Ada is constantly receiving. She has no friends her age: Liston, her father’s co-worker and close friend, serves as her only female confidante. So when David starts to forget things, even disappearing for hours at a time, to whom can Ada go for help? She’s reluctant to betray the secret of the only person who understands her: “They…looked like mirror images of one another; one larger, one smaller: a Rorschach test; a paper snowflake, unfolded." But then David’s condition begins to worsen rapidly, and Ada is forced to move in with Liston’s family. During this transition in custody, questions surrounding David’s past and identity begin to surface. But he’s no longer capable of explaining himself. Years later, Ada is working in Silicon Valley, and she still doesn’t have answers. What remains of her father before his decline is his life’s work, the language-processing program ELIXIR. David spent hours each day speaking with ELIXIR, teaching it new phrases. Can the program help Ada understand who David really was? While David’s mystery drives the story, this is an internally focused narrative that develops slowly through thoughts and observations rather than actions. This makes sense, as David's and Ada’s existences are so contained, but it takes patience to reach the point when the story becomes gripping. The biggest impact comes in the last chapter, which brings things together powerfully—if only chapters like this were intermingled throughout.
This is for readers who love a slow, methodical reveal.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-24168-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a...
Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel—strong and intricate in craft; devastating in impact.
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, this is the story of how former slaves, psychically crippled by years of outrage to their bodies and their humanity, attempt to "beat back the past," while the ghosts and wounds of that past ravage the present. The Ohio house where Sethe and her second daughter, 10-year-old Denver, live in 1873 is "spiteful. Full of a [dead] baby's venom." Sethe's mother-in-law, a good woman who preached freedom to slave minds, has died grieving. It was she who nursed Sethe, the runaway—near death with a newborn—and gave her a brief spell of contentment when Sethe was reunited with her two boys and first baby daughter. But the boys have by now run off, scared, and the murdered first daughter "has palsied the house" with rage. Then to the possessed house comes Paul D., one of the "Pauls" who, along with Sethe, had been a slave on the "Sweet Home" plantation under two owners—one "enlightened," one vicious. (But was there much difference between them?) Sethe will honor Paul D.'s humiliated manhood; Paul D. will banish Sethe's ghost, and hear her stories from the past. But the one story she does not tell him will later drive him away—as it drove away her boys, and as it drove away the neighbors. Before he leaves, Paul D. will be baffled and anxious about Sethe's devotion to the strange, scattered and beautiful lost girl, "Beloved." Then, isolated and alone together for years, the three women will cling to one another as mother, daughter, and sister—found at last and redeemed. Finally, the ex-slave community, rebuilding on ashes, will intervene, and Beloved's tortured vision of a mother's love—refracted through a short nightmare life—will end with her death.
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a victim's dark violence, with a lyrical insistence and a clear sense of the time when a beleaguered peoples' "only grace...was the grace they could imagine."Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1987
ISBN: 9781400033416
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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