Sometimes denser than a tangle of snakes, but Berry’s story never fails to engage.
Feisty teenager copes with first love, glasses, disasters, and wayward adults in this fourth novel from Kincaid. (Verbena, 2002, etc.).
Berry Jackson is trudging through adolescence in the overheated hamlet of Pinetta, Florida. The absence of shopping malls and superhighways, and the presence of cat’s-eye frames, Rexall lunch counters, quicksand, and chain gangs suggest the 1950s or early ’60s. Fluent in the local patois, undeterred by myopia and misgivings about her appearance, Berry is a garrulous observer of the teeming life around her. She shares a bedroom with her two brothers, younger Wade and older, oversexed Sowell, inheritor of the family good looks. Mom Ruthie feeds hobos, slings coffee, and moons over the Methodist minister, Butch Lyons. Ford Jackson is a revered school principal but a cipher of a father. On the social ladder, the Jacksons fall midway between the Longmonts, who own the gas station/grocery, and the Millers, who inhabit a kudzu-choked shack and overbreed. Episodic vignettes establish an atmosphere in which serpents, poisonous and nonpoisonous, aren’t just archetypes but everyday nuisances. Butch Lyons skips town, and the Methodists are called to hear Jewel Longmont confess to a dalliance with him. The story, after a languorous start, accelerates when a tornado hits. The big storm follows “goodbye-night,” a prom where the Millers’ abused and gorgeous elder daughter, Rennie, makes her glamorous debut in a borrowed dress. Ford Jackson drives her home through a flood—and both disappear. Much of Pinetta is leveled by the twister, and the state sends in convicts to help reconstruct, including Raymond, who rescues Berry both from snakebite and wallflower-dom. Ruthie finds a safe harbor with Jack Longmont after Jewel flees with her daughter, Marie. In a diva-ex-machina ending, Rennie returns to expose some lies and perpetuate others, before the swamp extrudes the truth about the missing pillars of Pinetta.
Sometimes denser than a tangle of snakes, but Berry’s story never fails to engage.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-316-00914-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Back Bay/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
Old passions, prejudices, and grudges surface in a Washington State island town when a Japanese man stands trial for the murder of a fisherman in the 1950s. Guterson (The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind, 1989, etc.) has written a thoughtful, poetic first novel, a cleverly constructed courtroom drama with detailed, compelling characters. Many years earlier, Kabuo Miyamoto's family had made all but the last payment on seven acres of land they were in the process of buying from the Heine family. Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and Kabuo's family was interned. Etta Heine, Carl's mother, called off the deal. Kabuo served in the war, returned, and wanted his land back. After changing hands a few times, the land ended up with Carl Heine. When Carl, a fisherman, is found drowned in his own net, all the circumstantial evidence, with the land dispute as a possible motive, points to Kabuo as the murderer. Meanwhile, Hatsue Miyamoto, Kabuo's wife, is the undying passion of Ishmael Chambers, the publisher and editor of the town newspaper. Ishmael, who returned from the war minus an arm, can't shake his obsession for Hatsue any more than he can ignore the ghost pains in his nonexistent arm. As a thick snowstorm whirls outside the courtroom, the story is unburied. The same incidents are recounted a number of times, with each telling revealing new facts. In the end, justice and morality are proven to be intimately woven with beauty—the kind of awe and wonder that children feel for the world. But Guterson communicates these truths through detail, not philosophical argument: Readers will come away with a surprising store of knowledge regarding gill-netting boats and other specifics of life in the Pacific Northwest. Packed with lovely moments and as compact as haiku—at the same time, a page-turner full of twists. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-100100-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.
A German teenager whose family moves to Alabama gets a deep-fried Southern gothic education.
Max is gifted, but if you’re thinking “honors student,” think again. He touches dead animals or withered plants and they return to life; whether his power (or curse, as Max thinks of it) works on dead people is part of the story’s suspense. The curse comes with pitfalls: Migraines besiege him after his resurrections, and he craves gobs of sugar. This insightful novel isn’t a fantasy, and Hudson treats Max’s gift as quite real. In addition, Hudson, an Alabama native, memorably evokes her home state, both its beauty and its warped rituals. Max’s father is an engineer, and the car company where he works has transferred him to a factory in Alabama; Max’s parents hope living there will give him a clean break from his troubled love for his dead classmate, Nils. Max is drawn to Pan, a witchy gay boy who wears dresses and believes in auras and incantations. Pan is the only person who knows about Max’s power. But Max also becomes enchanted with the Judge, a classmate's powerful father who’s running for governor and is vociferous about his astringent faith in Christ after an earlier life of sin (it's hard to read the novel and not think of Judge Roy Moore, who ran for U.S. Senate from Alabama, as the Judge’s real-life analogue). The Judge has plans for Max, who feels torn between his love for outcast Pan and the feeling of belonging the Judge provides. But that belonging has clear costs; the Judge likes to test potential believers by dosing them with poison. The real believers survive. Hudson invokes the tropes of Alabama to powerful effect: the bizarre fundamentalism; the religion of football; the cultlike unification of church and state. The tropes run the risk of feeling hackneyed, but this is Southern gothic territory, after all. Hudson brings something new to that terrain: an overt depiction of queer desire, welcome because writers such as Capote’s and McCullers’ depictions of queerness were so occluded.
A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-629-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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