Thoughtful work, but Youmans’s restrained, polished, and admirably unsentimental prose distances her characters from readers...
A slave girl and a young Confederate soldier experience pain and loss, in an elegantly written Civil War novel by the author of Catherwood (1996).
Unaware that it's become habit, a soldier softly sings the old nursery rhyme “Who Killed Cock Robin?” whenever he goes into battle. So his comrades call him Robin and are somehow cheered by the tune’s homeliness, as well as by the young man’s consistent show of quiet courage. The year is 1864, and there have been a lot of battles: many, too many, opportunities for Robin to exhibit that courage. In the meantime, back home, a smaller drama unfolds. Agate Freebody is a sensitive, intelligent slave girl savagely treated by a brute of a plantation owner. On the point of being sold, Agate gets a rare lucky break. Slave merchant Tucker Cobb, fat and feckless, leaves her untended long enough for Agate to make contact with a woman who happens to be passing by—and who happens to be Robin's mother. Aemelia and Agate have only minutes to establish a connection and contrive the plan that results in the slave’s escape. With Agate's secret cache of gold coins, Aemelia buys her, takes her home, gives her harborage and, shortly thereafter, freedom. The women become close, a process hastened, perhaps, by the recent death of Aemelia's daughter. She grieves, longs for the safe return of her only son. The bloody war continues, however, though its last act is now foreseeable. Robin is captured and shipped to the infamous prison camp in Elmira, New York: “Helmira” to the unfortunates held there. Robin's and Agate's stories run parallel, the one relentlessly bleak, the other possibly redemptive.
Thoughtful work, but Youmans’s restrained, polished, and admirably unsentimental prose distances her characters from readers yearning to be moved.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-29195-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature.
When the four adult Madigan children come home for Christmas to visit their widowed mother for the last time before the family house is sold, a familiar landscape of tensions is renewed and reordered.
Newly chosen as Ireland’s first fiction laureate, Enright (The Forgotten Waltz, 2012, etc.) showcases the unostentatious skill that underpins her success and popularity in this latest story of place and connection, set in an unnamed community in County Clare. Rosaleen Considine married beneath her when she took the hand of Pat Madigan decades ago. Their four children are now middle-aged, and only one of them, Constance, stayed local, marrying into the McGrath family, which has benefited comfortably from the nation’s financial boom. Returning to the fold are Dan, originally destined for the priesthood, now living in Toronto, gay and “a raging blank of a human being”; Emmet, the international charity worker struggling with attachment; and Hanna, the disappointed actress with a drinking problem. This is prime Enright territory, the fertile soil of home and history, cash and clan; or, in the case of the Madigan reunion, “all the things that were unsayable: failure, money, sex and drink.” Long introductions to the principal characters precede the theatrical format of the reunion, allowing Enright plenty of space to convey her brilliant ear for dialogue, her soft wit, and piercing, poetic sense of life’s larger abstractions. Like Enright's Man Booker Prize–winning The Gathering (2007), this novel traces experience across generations although, despite a brief crisis, this is a less dramatic story, while abidingly generous and humane.
A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature.Pub Date: May 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24821-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.
Walker (In Love and Trouble, Meridian) has set herself the task of an epistolary novel—and she scores strongly with it.
The time is in the Thirties; a young, black, Southern woman named Celie is the primary correspondent (God being her usual addressee); and the life described in her letters is one of almost impossible grimness. While young, Celie is raped by a stepfather. (Even worse, she believes him to be her real father.) She's made to bear two children that are then taken away from her. She's married off without her consent to an older man, Albert, who'd rather have Celie's sister Nettie—and, by sacrificing her body to Albert without love or feeling, Celie saves her sister, making it possible for her to escape: soon Nettle goes to Africa to work as a Christian missionary. Eventually, then, halfway through the book, as Celie's sub-literate dialect letters to God continue to mount (eventually achieving the naturalness and intensity of music, equal in beauty to Eudora Welty's early dialect stories), letters from Nettie in Africa begin to arrive. But Celie doesn't see them—because Albert holds them back from her. And it's only when Celie finds an unlikely redeemer—Albert's blues-singer lover Shug Avery—that her isolation ends: Shug takes Celie under her wing, becomes Celie's lover as well as Albert's; Shug's strength and expansiveness and wisdom finally free up Nettie's letters—thus granting poor Celie a tangible life in the now (Shug's love, encouragement) as well as a family life, a past (Nettie's letters). Walker fashions this book beautifully—with each of Celie's letters slowly adding to her independence (the implicit feminism won't surprise Walker's readers), with each letter deepening the rich, almost folk-tale-ish sense of story here. And, like an inverted pyramid, the novel thus builds itself up broadeningly while balanced on the frailest imaginable single point: the indestructibility—and battered-ness—of love.
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.Pub Date: June 28, 1982
ISBN: 0151191549
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
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