Be prepared to shed a tear or two.
No doubt about it, Scottish author Macleod is a master storyteller who plumbs the breadth and depth of emotions in this inspiring debut about a young black girl whose direction in life is defined by her inner strength and courage.
Arletta Johnson lives an insular existence in a small cabin near Brouillette, La., in the early 1900s, which she shares with her Mambo, the local voodoo priestess. They have a volatile relationship, and Arletta’s comments and actions often bring thwacks from her mother, who abandons her at home as she spends time drinking with boyfriends or using her voodoo to help the neighbors. Arletta fondly remembers her grandpa, the stabilizing influence in her life, who taught her to read and encouraged her to make something of herself. She cherishes his tin box, containing papers and his old wooden pipe, which she keeps buried near the shack. But being left alone in the cabin endangers Arletta in ways that Mambo never imagines: Two white pedophiles often visit Arletta while Mambo is gone and brutally rape and threaten her to keep her silence. After each vicious encounter, Arletta cleanses herself in a nearby creek, and it’s there, as she contemplates drowning herself, that she first hears a disembodied voice named Nellie who sings to her and encourages her to remain strong. When she’s 10, Mambo finally sends Arletta to school, where she excels and becomes friends with another young girl, Safi. But before Arletta’s 15th birthday, she and Safi find themselves working in a cotton mill and boarding with a sympathetic white widow and her black employee. Mambo and Arletta’s relationship changes as joyous events and misfortune touch their lives, but it’s the news that another young girl has been brutally assaulted by one of Arletta’s former attackers that ultimately unites mother and daughter in a single-minded purpose—and which permanently alters the path of Arletta’s life. Macleod brilliantly hooks the reader from beginning to end with a narrative that opens a floodgate of emotions and overflows with unforgettable characters.
Be prepared to shed a tear or two.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-78074-234-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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