Though it's a nice effort, Hatter falls short of giving Black Lives Matter the literary treatment it deserves.
A family's attempts to cope with loss are complicated when their personal tragedy forms the seed of a larger movement.
Malawi Walker, the youngest of three daughters of a prominent upper-middle-class black family from Washington, D.C., has recently moved to Florida to work as a teacher and be closer to a man she's dating. On her way home after a long evening spent hanging out with a fellow teacher, Malawi crashes her car and, with no cellphone service to call for help, walks up to the home of Jeffrey Davies, a white man, who shoots her twice after she knocks on his door. When she succumbs to her injuries, the Walker family quickly unravels, each remaining member coping with Malawi’s death in his or her own sometimes-destructive way: Malawi’s father and mother, Malcolm and Bet, rely on substances to deal with their pain, while Malawi’s two sisters, Kenya and Ghana, are forced to confront the realities of their relationships with their romantic partners, their parents, Malawi, and each other. Several of the characters will be immediately recognizable to readers—the high-achieving but unsatisfied older sister, the hippie middle sister—and at times Hatter (The Color of My Soul, 2011) seems to want to shoehorn other storylines into the novel, such as the coming-of-age of Malawi’s nephew, Junior. Hatter does try to make her characters more than stock types, and she generally succeeds, weaving the events of the story with the characters’ pasts, unveiling their motivations, and encouraging readers to regard them with compassion, all while attempting to capture the energy of a larger social moment. But in an effort to seem evenhanded and tie a neat bow on an otherwise difficult and complicated story, Hatter defangs the movement she attempts to fictionalize and portray with respect.
Though it's a nice effort, Hatter falls short of giving Black Lives Matter the literary treatment it deserves.Pub Date: March 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-945588-30-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Four Way
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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