An engaging but slow-paced tale about a man searching for his roots.
In this novel, an American orphan travels to Kenya and makes startling discoveries about his family pedigree.
Jude Wilson is abandoned as a baby and fortunately adopted by Tom and Doris. Jude is lovingly raised in Clarksville, Washington, a “placid, unassuming town.” His childhood is a happy, comfortable one, and he joins the Boy Scouts—his father is a scoutmaster—and learns to adore the outdoors. Despite being a Black youth in “lily-white Clarksville,” he’s largely untouched by the experience of racism and doesn’t seem particularly motivated to uncover his familial roots. But after Conor McKittrick, an old friend from high school, dies of cancer, Jude is inspired to seize the day and travel to Kenya to visit the graves of Lord Baden-Powell and Capt. Tom Wilson, both seminal figures in the history of the Boy Scouts. But Jude isn’t a worldly man—he’d never been on a plane before—and his naïveté makes him easy prey for criminal opportunists. In Kenya, he is drugged and robbed by a taxi driver and then arrested when he’s mistaken for a fugitive terrorist. But he meets a young man of Somalian descent, Qadir Mohamed, also an orphan, who might hold the key to unlocking the secrets of Jude’s lost past, a plot twist tenderly limned by Githaiga. The author is at his best depicting the experience of alienation: Qadir is doubly dislocated since his parents died when he was young, and as a Somalian, he routinely encounters prejudice in Nairobi. In addition, Githaiga has a keen eye for the ways in which an insidious brand of racism can exist beneath the surface of easily visible bigotry. Unfortunately, the plot ambles along at an unhurried pace. Moreover, the book’s obvious ending seems emotionally contrived, more formulaically cinematic than authentic.
An engaging but slow-paced tale about a man searching for his roots.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73504-174-2
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Bon Esprit Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
A fresh, often funny, always poignant take on the coming-of-age novel.
After a loss, a young British woman from a Ghanaian family reassesses her responsibilities.
Her name is Maddie, but the young protagonist in George’s engaging coming-of-age novel has always been known to her family as Maame, meaning woman. On the surface, this nickname is praise for Maddie’s reliability. Though she’s only 25, she works full time at a London publishing house and cares for her father, who’s in the late stages of Parkinson’s disease. Maddie’s older brother, James, has little interest in helping out, and their mother is living in Ghana and running the business she inherited from her own father. When she needs money, she always calls Maddie, who shoulders these expectations and burdens without complaint, never telling her friends about her frustrations: “We’re Ghanaian, so we do things differently” is an idea that's ingrained in her. Her only confidant is Google, to whom she types desperate questions and gets only moderately helpful responses. (Google does not truly understand the demands of a religious yet remote African-born mother.) But when Maddie loses her job and tragedy strikes, she begins to question the limits of family duty and wonders what sort of life she can create for herself. With a light but firm touch, George illustrates the casual racism a young Black woman can face in the British (or American) workplace and how cultural barriers can stand in the way of aspects of contemporary life such as understanding and treating depression. She examines Maddie’s awkward steps toward adulthood and its messy stew of responsibility, love, and sex with insight and compassion. The key to writing a memorable bildungsroman is creating an unforgettable character, and George has fashioned an appealing hero here: You can’t help but root for Maddie’s emancipation. Funny, awkward, and sometimes painful, her blossoming is a real delight to witness.
A fresh, often funny, always poignant take on the coming-of-age novel.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-2502-8252-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
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