Squirm-inducing, which surely was the author’s intention.
From memoirist and journalist McCall (What’s Going On: Personal Essays, 1997, etc.), a debut novel about an Atlanta neighborhood undergoing gentrification—or invasion, depending on your point of view.
The Old Fourth Ward, birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr., is a little run-down now that affluent blacks have been siphoned off to the integrated suburbs, but it’s still a cozy African-American community that’s tolerant of the old men who sit gabbing every day outside the Auburn Avenue Mini Mart, of the drunk couple often staggering along the sidewalks and of the homeless man always hustling for odd jobs. The Fourth suits Barlowe Reed, who dreams of buying the shabby house he rents at 1024 Randolph St., if he can just get a decent raise out of his cracker boss at the Copy Right Print Shop. It also appeals to Sean and Sandy Gilmore, part of an influx of whites drawn to the handsome old houses available “for the cost of a ham sandwich.” Sean and Sandy want to be good neighbors; they can’t understand why everyone regards them with hostility and suspicion. Readers will get it, as potholes neglected for years are filled in, police patrols appear out of nowhere to roust the drunks, and whites get elected to all the offices of the Fourth Ward Civic League, which promptly calls for an end to outdoor card-playing (so rowdy) and frontyard barbecues (“those hideous steel drums”). The tentative friendship between next-door neighbors Sandy and Barlowe doesn’t stand a chance in this increasingly tense atmosphere as tires are slashed and fires started in the mailboxes of white-owned homes. McCall’s characterizations are vivid rather than deep: With the exception of Sandy, all white folks are cluelessly arrogant, and among the somewhat more fully drawn African-Americans, only Barlowe has any real depth. The plot is similarly schematic; what matters here is McCall’s painfully honest portrait of a nation racked by racial mistrust.
Squirm-inducing, which surely was the author’s intention.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4915-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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