While hampered by modern-day babbling about dream theory, this Colonial tale still delivers engaging characters and an...
A historical novel examines what might have happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke.
The author explores the fate of 16th-century English colonists on Roanoke Island (in what is now North Carolina). Abandoned by their captain, they fight Native Americans and hunger. Emily Colman, a comely lass, is courted by many men, including Hugh Tayler, an older colonist with a dubious past. In 2000, meanwhile, Allie O’Shay, a doctoral candidate in psychology, enlists the help of a professor to study her dreams about these settlers. Back in 16th-century America, her dreams reveal deteriorating conditions. Colonists and Native Americans commit atrocities against each other. When a Spanish man-of-war arrives off the coast, the settlers flee, only to endure a fatal shipwreck and an arduous overland trek. Settling near some friendly Chesapeake Indians, they rough it while awaiting help from England. Emily falls in love with a Lakota Sioux named Isna, who’s visiting the Chesapeakes. She discovers that Tayler is “evil to the core”—confirmed when he rapes her and tries to force her into marriage by threatening to kill her friend’s baby. Eventually, Isna wounds Tayler, who’s later killed by a war party of Powhatans on its way to wiping out the colonists. But Isna and Emily manage to escape. In the 21st century, Allie realizes she’s dreaming about her family’s history, just as some of her female forebears have done, and that they’re Isna and Emily’s descendants. This sprawling novel, based on Rhynard’s 1991 YA book with the same title, is ambitious but not completely successful. He’s at his best when describing 16th-century folkways, providing detailed accounts of everyday lives, down to making bayberry candles and pemmican. His main Colonial characters are well-drawn, and their story is engrossing, action-packed, and well-plotted. But weaving in modern-day Allie and telling the tale through the lens of her dreams becomes distracting. Allie’s storyline seems superfluous in a 785-page tome. Modern characters’ dialogue can be trite, and the 16th-century dialogue, though better, contains too much exposition and an occasional howler (a colonist crying, “Fate, shmate!”). Rhynard also exhibits an unfortunate weakness for clichés such as “the writing was on the wall” and overuses silly similes: “like a millipede stampede.” The novel would have worked better as a purely historical speculation.
While hampered by modern-day babbling about dream theory, this Colonial tale still delivers engaging characters and an energetic plot.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5170-5484-7
Page Count: 798
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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