A heartfelt tale of embracing life after a devastating rape.
A rape survivor makes peace with her past and finds happiness with her family’s support.
Martin-Yates (Life Is but a Four-Leaf Clover, 2016) opens her latest novel in November 1974, as 15-year-old Karen Bowen sneaks away from Thanksgiving with her family, which the narrator calls “much like the average black family that originates from Memphis, Tennessee.” On the way to her friend Gloria’s house, Karen is dragged into an abandoned building by Paul White, the older boy she has a crush on, and raped. She tells no one about the rape until she is seven months pregnant but eventually finds support from her mother, Brenda, and her grandmother Pearl. Karen gives birth to a daughter she names Angel, but for many years her anger over the rape keeps her from being a loving mother. Several years later, Karen interrupts the rape of Barbara Jones and accidentally kills the attacker. She is able to keep her role in the death a secret, and the emotional fallout from the event allows her to finally bond with Angel. Karen and Barbara later become friends. Soon Karen falls in love with Tate, the detective investigating Barbara’s case. Meanwhile, the adolescent Angel begins to search for her father and meets Paul, now a deacon at a nearby church. Martin-Yates does an excellent job of presenting Karen’s emotional transformation, from the teenage years defined by the rape through adulthood, when she gradually gains maturity, independence, and comfort. Paul, “a good man who had made a horrible mistake,” also experiences growth, but in this tale about forgiveness, readers will not see him face major consequences. The writing is uneven, with awkward phrasing (“She fell on her couch, mimicking a schoolgirl having her first crush”) and overused words (Several sentences begin with “Instantly”). Yet on the whole, the author delivers a satisfying story of redemption.
A heartfelt tale of embracing life after a devastating rape.Pub Date: April 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-09675-8
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Angels In The Rye
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A rich, deeply felt novel about family ties, immigration, sexual longing, faith, and desire. Simultaneously raw and luminous.
In U.S.–based Colombian author Delgado Lopera's coming-of-age novel, a 15-year-old Colombian girl struggles with her identity and her burgeoning sexuality.
Dragged unwillingly from Bogotá to Miami, crammed with her mother and sister into her grandmother's apartment at the Heather Glen Apartment Complex, Francisca misses her friends and her former life. But she can't go home, because "this wasn't a Choose Your Own Migration multiple-choice adventure." In a scene early in the book, her mother insists on baptizing a child she miscarried 17 years before, using a plastic doll from a discount store as a stand-in baby. Manic one moment and sad the next, Mami has joined the Iglesia Cristiana Jesucristo Redentor, an evangelical Colombian church in "a stinky room in the Hyatt Hotel nobody cared to vacuum." In the car on their way there, the doll stares at Francisca with a fixed, plastic smile. "Are you happy now, asshole, I wanted to say....You're still dead, pendejo." With a whip-smart, unapologetic voice peppered with Colombian slang, Francisca pulls us into her new life in "Yanquilandia." Trouble arises when she meets Carmen the pastor's daughter, who wants her to accept Jesus into her heart. Francisca imagines God in "a dentist's waiting room checking in with the receptionist every so often, Did Francisca receive my son in her heart yet? (said no God ever)." Instead, she finds herself falling in love with Carmen, threatening her family's tenuous place in the immigrant community. Though the plot revolves around a coming-out story, the great strength of Delgado Lopera's writing lies in its layered portrayals of these characters and their world. "Women in my family possessed a sixth sense...from the close policing of our sadness: Your tristeza wasn't yours, it was part of the larger collective female sadness jar to which we all contributed."
A rich, deeply felt novel about family ties, immigration, sexual longing, faith, and desire. Simultaneously raw and luminous.Pub Date: March 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-936932-75-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
The inestimably gifted Boyle (The Road to Wellville, 1993, etc.) puts on a preacher's gown and mounts the pulpit to proclaim a hellfire sermon against bigotry and greedin this rather wan updating of The Grapes of Wrath. If Boyle is to be believed, Los Angeles County has gradually evolved into a kind of minimum-security prison, with the prosperous Anglos living in fear of their lives behind the walls of their suburban security compounds. Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher moved as far from the city as they could, and settled in a tastefully ``authentic'' tract development just above Topanga Canyon. Au courant to a fault, Kyra brings home the bacon as a hot-shot real estate agent, while Delaney stands in as Mr. Momcooking their lowfat meals, seeing after their pets and their son, and writing a monthly column for a nature magazine. Below them, in the Canyon itself, C†ndido and AmÇrica Ricon have crossed the Mexican border illegally and seek refuge of their own in the makeshift camp they've erected. C†ndido meets Delaney at the beginning of the story when Delaney runs him down with his car, and this pretty much establishes the tone of their relations throughout. C†ndido, as hapless as his namesake in Voltaire, wants only to work and look after his pregnant wife, but he's thwarted on every side by an exasperated white society with no room for him. Implausible circumstances keep bringing Delaney and C†ndido back to each other, and the tension that builds between them becomes an image of the ferocity that smolders within the city around themexploding in an apocalyptic climax that combines a brushfire and a riot, with an earthquake thrown in for good measure. A morality play too obvious to be swallowed whole: Boyle's first real lemon so far. (First printing of 100,000; First serial to Los Angeles Times Magazine; $100,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-85604-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
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