A deliberately over-the-top but sensitive take on multiple touchy subjects.
A celebrated professor who passes for Indian is revealed to be White. Is she a fraud or a trailblazer?
This provocative fiction debut and satire of identity politics by Sanyal, a German academic, centers on Saraswati, a Düsseldorf professor who’s infamous for her outspoken proclamations about race and social justice: She’s shut down Jordan Peterson in debate and kicked White students out of her courses. She’s a hero to Nivedita, a graduate student who’s been inspired by Saraswati to explore her own mixed-race background and launch a blog under the name Identitti. So she’s crushed when it’s revealed that Saraswati isn’t South Asian but a White woman named Sarah. Commentators quickly break out the hashtags (#SaraswatiShame) and liken her to Rachel Dolezal, the White college instructor who presented herself as Black. But Saraswati doesn’t retreat. She insists that race, much like gender, can be fluid and that her leaning into racial issues represents a noble rejection of Whiteness. “So it’s okay to transcend your gender, but a category as obviously made-up as race should be more fixed and inflexible than sex?” she asks Nivedita, and the narrative is thick with such questions. Sanyal mocks Saraswati’s privilege and sanctimony but takes her perspective seriously; the book refers often to writers on race, gender, and postcolonialism, from Frantz Fanon to bell hooks to Zadie Smith. Though the novel is effectively a long series of conversations in an apartment among Saraswati, Nivedita, and other interlocutors, it has a surprising liveliness thanks to Sanyal’s knack for sending up academia and social media pile-ons and her canny interweaving of Hindu mythology. (The goddess Kali provides an extended metaphor.) “What it means to be white must be allowed to change and expand,” Saraswati insists, and the novel is an eyebrow-raising prompt to debate the matter.
A deliberately over-the-top but sensitive take on multiple touchy subjects.Pub Date: July 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-662-60129-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
Readers won’t want to leave behind the imagined world of pain and beauty that McConaghy has conjured.
The reality of climate change serves as the pervasive context for this terrific thriller set on a remote island between Australia and Antarctica.
Four family members and one stranger are trapped on an island with no means of communication—what could go wrong? The setup may sound like a mix of Agatha Christie and The Swiss Family Robinson, but Australian author McConaghy is not aiming for a cozy read. Shearwater Island—loosely based on Macquarie Island, a World Heritage Site—is a research station where scientists have been studying environmental change. For eight years, widowed Dominic Salt has been the island’s caretaker, raising his three children in a paradise of abundant wildlife. But Shearwater is receding under rising seas and will soon disappear. The researchers have recently departed by ship, and in seven weeks a second ship will pick up Dominic and his kids. Meanwhile, they are packing up the seed vault built by the United Nations in case the world eventually needs “to regrow from scratch the food supply that sustains us.” One day a woman, Rowan, washes ashore unconscious but alive after a storm destroys the small boat on which she was traveling. Why she’s come anywhere near Shearwater is a mystery to Dominic; why the family is alone there is a mystery to her. While Rowan slowly recovers, Dominic’s kids, especially 9-year-old Orly—who never knew his mother—become increasingly attached, and Rowan and Dominic fight their growing mutual attraction. But as dark secrets come to light—along with buried bodies—mutual suspicions also grow. The five characters’ internal narratives reveal private fears, guilts, and hopes, but their difficulty communicating, especially to those they love, puts everyone in peril. While McConaghy keeps readers guessing which suspicions are valid, which are paranoia, and who is culpable for doing what in the face of calamity, the most critical battle turns out to be personal despair versus perseverance. McConaghy writes about both nature and human frailty with eloquent generosity.
Readers won’t want to leave behind the imagined world of pain and beauty that McConaghy has conjured.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781250827951
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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