Flags a little at the finish line, but nonetheless well worth plunging into.
Energetic first novel shows a talented athlete moving toward the Olympics and away from a Kansas family crippled by emotional instability and grievous loss.
We first glimpse protagonist-narrator Philomena, nicknamed Pip, as an infant gradually adjusting to her family and environment. She’s precociously skilled at demanding attention: “I’ve been experimenting with howling like a wolf,” she tells us at nine months old. Despite the hovering, intimidating presences of her depressed mom, borderline-flaky dad (a research scientist studying bat behavior) and contentious sisters, Pip is soon garlanded with as many great expectations as was her Dickensian namesake. She’s a physically gifted, naturally competitive swimmer who breaks local and state records while competing for her school and church before nabbing gold at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and moving on to further triumphs. The novel settles into bristling rhythms that contrast Pip’s conquests of the swimming world, college and even sex (which she has always dreaded) with successive personal crises and tragedies that shake her confidence, setting her at odds with demanding coaches, dictatorial nuns and frustrating boyfriends as she tests the tricky waters of growing up and making choices. Slightly reminiscent of Lisa Alther’s Kinflicks (1976), though the sexual emphases here are more varied, the novel boasts as its best feature insouciant, perky prose offered in a rollicking, present-tense narrative voice. Too bad, therefore, that Keegan lets the story trail away after sending Pip to Paris for a period of self-scrutiny. Her conclusion offers nothing more revelatory than token acceptance of whatever the future holds for an athlete “retired” while still an unfinished woman.
Flags a little at the finish line, but nonetheless well worth plunging into.Pub Date: July 17, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-26997-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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