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HOUSEGIRL

Name: HOUSEGIRL
Author: Michael Donkor
ISBN: 978-1-250-30517-6

by Michael Donkor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 28, 2018

An intimate and resonant take on finding one’s place in the world even while being pulled in opposing directions.

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What does it mean to come of age, and how does that change depending on where you live? In his debut novel, Donkor explores the tensions of growing up between two cultures as three young women face the challenges of adolescence in Ghana and among the Ghanaian diaspora in London.

Just after the millennium, 17-year-old Belinda and 11-year-old Mary are live-in maids for a wealthy elderly couple—whom they call Aunty and Uncle—who made their money in the U.K. and retired to their native Ghana. When Ghanaian friends still living in London come to visit, it’s decided that they’ll bring Belinda back with them to London to act as a good influence on their moody, rebellious, and thoroughly Westernized teenage daughter, Amma. (Donkor’s parents are Ghanaian; he was born in London.) Donkor’s deft shifts between spheres and scenes—house parties populated by posh British teens; the rural village where Belinda grew up and where she and her mother are mysteriously ostracized; the opulent home where Belinda and Mary work—are confident and illuminating, revealing the complexity and nuance of modern life, particularly for immigrants. Dialogue, both external and internal, is often a delight—Mary and Belinda’s speech is peppered with pop-culture references and Twi idioms. (There’s a helpful glossary at the beginning of the book, though some phrases go untranslated.) As Belinda teases Mary on the phone, shortly after she arrives in London: “And what do you know of planes? Oh, I forgot, you are in aeroplanes all of the time, isn’t it? Like a smaller Naomi Campbell.” The narrative stays closest to Belinda’s perspective, as it is she who travels from Ghana to England and back again. Throughout the novel, growing up is characterized as a series of losses, as Belinda, Amma, and Mary face death, limited opportunity, and unrequited first love. While the conclusion veers toward didacticism, Belinda learns that there’s power in living through loss, too.

An intimate and resonant take on finding one’s place in the world even while being pulled in opposing directions.

Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-250-30517-6

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Picador

Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.