A wonderful set of 16 stories that covers a lot of ground and features many genres—from myth and folklore to the postmodern...
Short fiction by some of Africa’s most talented writers.
Since 2000, the annual Caine Prize in African Writing has celebrated some of the most innovative and evocative English-language short fiction by African writers. This collection, which features the five stories shortlisted for this year's prize, as well as 11 stories written during the 2017 Caine Prize Writers’ Workshop, held in Tanzania, continues that tradition. The anthology opens impressively with “Who Will Greet You At Home,” one of two stories by Lesley Nneka Arimah (author of Kirkus Prize finalist What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, 2017), a harrowing and subtly complex tale about a young girl whose obsession with becoming a mother has dire consequences. The often fraught relationship between parent and child is a theme found in several other pieces, including Darla Rudakaubana’s painful “Family Ties” and Lydia Kasese’s surprising “My Mother’s Project,” an exploration of the limits of perspective that unveils what it means to see one’s parents as complicated people. The prize winner, Bushra al-Fadil’s “The Story of the Girl Whose Birds Flew Away,” is a vibrant delineation of a summer day in the market and a fateful encounter. Agazit Abate’s “Fidel,” a humorous recounting of the main character’s breakup with her boyfriend and her immense love for Fidel Castro, adds levity to the collection. Love and sexuality are also expertly explored in Arinze Ifeakandu’s achingly beautiful “God’s Children are Little Broken Things” and Daniel Rafiki’s speculative fiction, “Five Is Not Half of Ten,” which will leave readers asking the proverbial, What happened next? Indeed, all the authors render their stories well, building hauntingly familiar or fascinatingly new worlds and exploring them creatively.
A wonderful set of 16 stories that covers a lot of ground and features many genres—from myth and folklore to the postmodern and experimental—in a way that will surely satisfy readers.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56656-034-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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