Even if the convulsive strands in Walters’s largest web yet never come together with the knotty precision of her earlier...
What would happen if the citizens of a big-scale suspense novel were as many-dimensional as the suspects in Walters’s seven striking mysteries—too complex by far to be pigeonholed as heroes and villains? They’d be the denizens of Bassindale Estate, the English housing project that erupts in a violent riot.
Thanks to Fay Baldwin, a spiteful health-care visitor who didn’t retire soon enough to keep herself from spreading the news that police had just relocated a known pedophile to guilelessly named Humbert Road, the street is soon abuzz with rumors about Nicholas Hollis, né Milosz Zelowski. It’s particularly bad timing for Nicholas’s neighbor Laura Biddulph, whose ten-year-old daughter, Amy Rogerson, has just walked out of Laura’s intolerable domestic arrangement—a clear-eyed swap of sex for shelter with middle-aged bus driver Gregory Logan and his two monstrous children—and off the face of the earth. And it’s even worse timing for Nightingale Health Centre physician Sophie Morrison and WPC Wendy Hanson, both of whom are trapped inside Bassindale when outraged neighbors egged on by shiftless teenagers armed with Molotov cocktails constitute themselves a lynch mob. In crossing over from ferociously literate whodunits like The Shape of Snakes (2001), Walters handles the teeming cast and the buildup of danger and suspense authoritatively, from the opening whispers to the inevitable fatalities. Her real achievement here, however, is in the oddly sympathetic pedophile, the angry heroine, her ex-con rescuer, the pitifully unformed teenage provocateurs, Amy’s willfully irresponsible mother and smoothly complicit father, and an underage victim who turns out to be just as exploitative, though a lot less powerful, than the plausible scoundrel who preys on her.
Even if the convulsive strands in Walters’s largest web yet never come together with the knotty precision of her earlier plots, they all show the damning effects of helplessly raging long-term victims thrashing out in turn to hurt anyone in reach.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-399-14862-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a...
Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel—strong and intricate in craft; devastating in impact.
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, this is the story of how former slaves, psychically crippled by years of outrage to their bodies and their humanity, attempt to "beat back the past," while the ghosts and wounds of that past ravage the present. The Ohio house where Sethe and her second daughter, 10-year-old Denver, live in 1873 is "spiteful. Full of a [dead] baby's venom." Sethe's mother-in-law, a good woman who preached freedom to slave minds, has died grieving. It was she who nursed Sethe, the runaway—near death with a newborn—and gave her a brief spell of contentment when Sethe was reunited with her two boys and first baby daughter. But the boys have by now run off, scared, and the murdered first daughter "has palsied the house" with rage. Then to the possessed house comes Paul D., one of the "Pauls" who, along with Sethe, had been a slave on the "Sweet Home" plantation under two owners—one "enlightened," one vicious. (But was there much difference between them?) Sethe will honor Paul D.'s humiliated manhood; Paul D. will banish Sethe's ghost, and hear her stories from the past. But the one story she does not tell him will later drive him away—as it drove away her boys, and as it drove away the neighbors. Before he leaves, Paul D. will be baffled and anxious about Sethe's devotion to the strange, scattered and beautiful lost girl, "Beloved." Then, isolated and alone together for years, the three women will cling to one another as mother, daughter, and sister—found at last and redeemed. Finally, the ex-slave community, rebuilding on ashes, will intervene, and Beloved's tortured vision of a mother's love—refracted through a short nightmare life—will end with her death.
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a victim's dark violence, with a lyrical insistence and a clear sense of the time when a beleaguered peoples' "only grace...was the grace they could imagine."Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1987
ISBN: 9781400033416
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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