Does it last? Readers are left guessing to the very end. This is a lively, thoughtful and beautifully written flight of...
Imagine Plato’s Republic as founded by the child of Diderot and Charles Dickens, without the fascism but with plenty of rules: That’s Dingley Dell, a place where life is “perpetually shrouded in impenetrable mystery.”
Dunn plows fruitful land in this follow-up to his altogether more lighthearted but no less inventive Ella Minnow Pea (2001), positing a bookish place where cultural life is governed by old encyclopedias, Victorian novels and guild labor to do William Morris proud. No one knows where the Dell of Dingley, or Dingley Dell—fans of The Pickwick Papers, or of more obscure Monty Python bits, will remember the name—really lies: Some say Campania, others East Asia, though the coal seams and “conspicuous absence of the European Jay” suggest the Appalachians. Dingley Dell isn’t exactly paradise, but it’ll do, and its inhabitants are content to live in its shelter, speaking a language that is a little hobbity around the edges and remaining only dimly aware, via the “suppositive postulations,” that a larger world exists out there but is not to be welcomed in or sought out. It’s not exactly M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, but the fact remains that Dingley Dell exists for an odd reason, and that certain Outlanders harbor ill designs on it. When those designs are revealed, it’s up to the Dinglians to go to war for their own survival, having learned about guerrilla warfare from who knows where. Set logic aside; Dunn crafts a pleasing, smart entertainment that slyly comments on and draws from a whole swath of fantasy and dystopian standards, from Fahrenheit 451 to the assembled works of Tolkien. In writing of his lost tribe, his “little people from an orographically anomalous valley,” he invents a believable world, one that, wicked beings that we Outlanders are, would not seem likely to last.
Does it last? Readers are left guessing to the very end. This is a lively, thoughtful and beautifully written flight of fancy.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59692-369-0
Page Count: 350
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
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 promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.
A novel of sharply drawn character studies immersed in more than 250 hard, transformative years in the African-American diaspora.
Gyasi’s debut novel opens in the mid-1700s in what is now Ghana, as tribal rivalries are exploited by British and Dutch colonists and slave traders. The daughter of one tribal leader marries a British man for financial expediency, then learns that the “castle” he governs is a holding dungeon for slaves. (When she asks what’s held there, she’s told “cargo.”) The narrative soon alternates chapters between the Ghanans and their American descendants up through the present day. On either side of the Atlantic, the tale is often one of racism, degradation, and loss: a slave on an Alabama plantation is whipped “until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby”; a freedman in Baltimore fears being sent back South with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; a Ghanan woman is driven mad from the abuse of a missionary and her husband’s injury in a tribal war; a woman in Harlem is increasingly distanced from (and then humiliated by) her husband, who passes as white. Gyasi is a deeply empathetic writer, and each of the novel’s 14 chapters is a savvy character portrait that reveals the impact of racism from multiple perspectives. It lacks the sweep that its premise implies, though: while the characters share a bloodline, and a gold-flecked stone appears throughout the book as a symbolic connector, the novel is more a well-made linked story collection than a complex epic. Yet Gyasi plainly has the talent to pull that off: “I will be my own nation,” one woman tells a British suitor early on, and the author understands both the necessity of that defiance and how hard it is to follow through on it.
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94713-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
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