A modest book with heroic pretentions likely to appeal most to the Sedona/Santa Fe set.
What to make of a kid born with four ears? One thing’s for sure: he’s bound to listen.
Novelist/screenwriter Golding (Benjamin’s Gift, 1999, etc.) strains for significance and symbolic import with this yarn, a blend of fable and what Edward Said would surely call (and not as a compliment) orientalist fantasy, with The Other being strange and inscrutable but all-too-human for all that. With his four ears, “placed side by side, like pairs of matched seashells,” Nouri Ahmad Mohammad ibn Mahsoud al-Morad can’t help but be noticed for good and ill—and mostly for ill, since the superstitious inhabitants of his little village are naturally curious, and not in a complimentary way, about the kid. The hero has an unusual feature: check. The hero sets off on a heroic journey: check. The hero is misunderstood and feared: check. With a Joseph Campbell–worthy schematic, the kid heads off to the big city to find such fortunes as the djinns and deity will allow. Fortunately for the sage Nouri, he falls in with Sufis whose master sees in him the makings of a pretty cool dude. Followers with arcane knowledge: check, as Golding waxes encyclopedic: “Centered on the chanting of litanies and accompanied by the playing of music, the sema was deep at the heart of Sufi practice.” Sema-antics aside, Nouri undergoes all sorts of adventures in quest of—well, that’d be telling, but suffice it to say that there are fraught moments throughout (“the look on Vishpar’s face as the marauder ran him through was what remained in Nouri’s heart as they carried him away”). There’s a Life of Pi–ish tang to the whole enterprise, although, to his credit, Golding is the better writer, and he manages to avoid the worst of New Age treacliness. And, for whatever reason, there’s lots of good eating throughout, complete with a glossary of food terms. For what hero wants to go hungry?
A modest book with heroic pretentions likely to appeal most to the Sedona/Santa Fe set.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-07128-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Wingate sheds light on a shameful true story of child exploitation but is less successful in engaging readers in her...
Avery Stafford, a lawyer, descendant of two prominent Southern families and daughter of a distinguished senator, discovers a family secret that alters her perspective on heritage.
Wingate (Sisters, 2016, etc.) shifts the story in her latest novel between present and past as Avery uncovers evidence that her Grandma Judy was a victim of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society and is related to a woman Avery and her father meet when he visits a nursing home. Although Avery is living at home to help her parents through her father’s cancer treatment, she is also being groomed for her own political career. Readers learn that investigating her family’s past is not part of Avery's scripted existence, but Wingate's attempts to make her seem torn about this are never fully developed, and descriptions of her chemistry with a man she meets as she's searching are also unconvincing. Sections describing the real-life orphanage director Georgia Tann, who stole poor children, mistreated them, and placed them for adoption with wealthy clients—including Joan Crawford and June Allyson—are more vivid, as are passages about Grandma Judy and her siblings. Wingate’s fans and readers who enjoy family dramas will find enough to entertain them, and book clubs may enjoy dissecting the relationship and historical issues in the book.
Wingate sheds light on a shameful true story of child exploitation but is less successful in engaging readers in her fictional characters' lives.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-425-28468-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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