A vividly drawn period piece about violence and race in America.
Two kids living in the Bronx grow up in an era dominated by drugs, racial tension, and the Vietnam War in this novel.
Jaylen Jackson and his brother, Jamani, are swept out of the Jim Crow South by their mother, Tyra, after their father disappears. Jimmy O’Farrell’s father, Matthew, moves his family to New York City from Ireland, hoping to become part of America’s immigration legacy. Both Jaylen and Jimmy find a home in the Bronx, yet outside their passion for basketball, they have remarkably different experiences there and only cross paths on “The Courts.” Jimmy feels comfortable in the heavily Irish community, but after a violent gang attack takes a friend’s life, he is ill at ease around the Black and Hispanic families in New York’s melting pot. Jaylen, meanwhile, discovers that while the “Whites Only” signs of Mississippi are long gone, his skin color still matters, and he eventually leaves college to join the Marines, an institution that promises a life beyond such prejudice. But this is the 1960s, and the Vietnam War rages, and even for an accomplished soldier, there is no real equality to be unearthed in the Asian jungles. What he does find, surprisingly, is Jimmy, now a Marine himself and happy to see a familiar face from the Bronx. When both are wounded, a chance encounter on the USS Sanctuary gives Jaylen a blunt moment to peel back the racial facade that separates them, a revelation that will shape the two men’s decisions after returning home. Coffino employs an understandable language in the novel’s action scenes, particularly on the basketball court and with other team sports. Even Jimmy and his family’s listening to the 1960s World Series is exciting and high stakes. New York comes alive in the book, a place of great history and infinite possibility, with people of all races and creeds constantly in both cooperation and conflict. Vietnam is deftly captured as a carnal, violent place, and the only setting that comes up short in the story is its portrayal of Jim Crow Mississippi, its communities, perhaps rightfully, taking a back seat to its vile politics. Dreams, folklore, and Bible verses foreshadow events and outline characters’ anxieties, connecting them beyond race and through a shared culture and experiences.
A vividly drawn period piece about violence and race in America.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64663-350-0
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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