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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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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