Light on plot detail, heavy on moral lessons.
In Wanjiku’s debut, a young Kenyan woman flees her tribe and its traditions in the hope of finding love and equality.
When Jenny Naeku is born in a Maasai village in Kenya, she greets the world with a strong cry and a raised fist. But there’s “no place in the village for big-mouthed girls,” Wanjiku writes. Years later, Jenny observes the village’s customs of female castration and arranged marriages and decides that “if she was to be with a man, it had to be her heart’s desire.” When she’s 14, she learns that her father wants her to marry a stranger. With her mother’s blessing, Jenny flees the village, making her way to Nairobi, where she hopes to have the “power to build and control her queendom.” There, she meets Rosie Wambui, a young woman who’d been sold to sex traffickers, and Diana, who escaped a violent marriage; these interactions make Jenny realize that women are oppressed all over the world. One day, while strolling in the forest, she meets the handsome Johnny, a 40-year-old millionaire from England. They marry and move to the United Kingdom, but once there, Johnny doesn’t introduce Jenny to his family, and he keeps his business a secret from her. From there, things only get worse. Throughout this novel, Wanjiku provides readers with enlightening information about traditional African culture, which she also compares to Western culture. However, it seems as if the author didn’t trust readers to grasp the story’s important message of female empowerment; the word “queendom,” for instance, is repeated over and over in this slender book. Also, although the story dedicates entire paragraphs to Jenny’s fight for equality, it glosses over some major plot points: Within two pages, for example, she’s hired and then fired from a job. Overall, it seems as if the author is far more concerned with message than with narrative.
Light on plot detail, heavy on moral lessons.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-3556-5
Page Count: 196
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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