Sherman’s insider knowledge illuminates this compassionate character study.
In her debut novel, social worker Sherman (Jailed, 2011) paints a vivid portrait of an older homeless woman in custody on a psychiatric ward.
Mary Motter, once a veterans hospital social worker, now lives on the streets of Oakland, California. One day, drunk and stoned, Mary stumbles upon an abandoned baby outside a hospital. As hallucinations blend with memories of her own baby daughter, given up for adoption five decades ago, Mary feels an overwhelming compulsion to bury the tiny corpse. When she wakes up, though, she is handcuffed in a hospital psychiatric ward: Police tell her the baby was alive when it arrived at the hospital. The next two months are a nightmare of trials, interviews and neurologist appointments as Mary and her lawyers fight involuntary manslaughter charges. Mary’s first-person voice is instantly distinctive, both witty and forthright: “My blisters have blisters. I’m parched as hell.” She seems to blend her past and present; her mother’s funeral, her rebellious adolescence and out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and scenes from her marriages are just as intense as day-to-day hospital life. Sherman ably alternates reminiscences (often dredged up by the sight or smell of food) and present-day action, recording Mary’s confused thoughts and fostering sympathy for this unreliable narrator. The author’s professional experience translates into believable passages detailing group therapy sessions and two patient suicides. She also uses, to good effect, birds as metaphors of lost innocence and crushed hopes. Mary’s matter-of-fact statements about her predicament, however, sometimes lack subtlety: “I was disregarded and discounted….I can’t believe what’s happened to me…the abuse, neglect, not caring.” Readers will most likely empathize with Mary despite occasional emotional browbeating—though they may wish the novel explained precisely how she descended into homelessness.
Sherman’s insider knowledge illuminates this compassionate character study.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496071972
Page Count: 222
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.
Edgy humor and fierce imagery coexist in these stories with shrewd characterization and humane intelligence, inspired by volatile material sliced off the front pages.
The state of race relations in post-millennial America haunts most of the stories in this debut collection. Yet Adjei-Brenyah brings to what pundits label our “ongoing racial dialogue” a deadpan style, an acerbic perspective, and a wicked imagination that collectively upend readers’ expectations. “The Finkelstein 5,” the opener, deals with the furor surrounding the murder trial of a white man claiming self-defense in slaughtering five black children with a chainsaw. The story is as prickly in its view toward black citizens seeking their own justice as it is pitiless toward white bigots pressing for an acquittal. An even more caustic companion story, “Zimmer Land,” is told from the perspective of an African-American employee of a mythical theme park whose white patrons are encouraged to act out their fantasies of dispensing brutal justice to people of color they regard as threatening on sight, or “problem solving," as its mission statement calls it. Such dystopian motifs recur throughout the collection: “The Era,” for example, identifies oppressive class divisions in a post-apocalyptic school district where self-esteem seems obtainable only through regular injections of a controlled substance called “Good.” The title story, meanwhile, riotously reimagines holiday shopping as the blood-spattered zombie movie you sometimes fear it could be in real life. As alternately gaudy and bleak as such visions are, there’s more in Adjei-Brenyah’s quiver besides tough-minded satire, as exhibited in “The Lion & the Spider,” a tender coming-of-age story cleverly framed in the context of an African fable.
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-91124-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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