An impressionistic saga from CondÇ (see above)—the story of a Caribbean family whose history is as much their own as it is their native island's. When the narrator's forebear, Albert Louis, decides to go to Panama to make his fortune building the canal rather than stay at home cutting sugar like all his fellow blacks, he begins the ascendancy of the Louis family—a family that over the years will be divided by color (not just black and white but all the shades in between), money, and politics. In Panama, Albert finds money but not a fortune, encounters racial prejudice, learns about Marcus Garvey, and marries a Jamaican who dies giving birth to son Bert. Back home in Guadeloupe, the embittered father prospers in business but is disliked for his meanness and surly disposition. A second marriage follows, and the narrator's grandfather, the ugly but hard-working Jacob, is born. Births and deaths occur at a clip; the dead advise the living in dreams; and characters travel to New York, where more is learned of Garvey and black politics, and to France, where Bert, disowned because of his marriage to a white woman, commits suicide. Then on to Bert's niece, Jacob's daughter, pampered and indulged ThÇcla, who moves to France pregnant with the narrator, whom she leaves with a white family. Abandoned by her black lover, ThÇcla marries a white doctor, takes a side trip to New York, where she has an affair with a Malcolm X follower; goes to Jamaica, this time with daughter and new lover in tow; and then finally returns to her white husband in Paris, leaving daughter with grandfather and the obligation to tell ``the story of very ordinary people who in their own way had nonetheless made blood flow.'' Vivid writing, and certainly wide-ranging, though sometimes the fast pace leads to skimping on the plot. Still, a very readable story of an unfamiliar territory.
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1992
ISBN: 0-345-36074-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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