An imperfect yet compelling volume that evokes life in Virginia during slavery.
Wiggins (Why Should I Nurse My Baby, 2012) examines the dynamics between master and slave in this novel of the antebellum South.
As word of Nat Turner’s Rebellion spreads through Southampton County, Virginia, plantation owner John Parker sets about defending his family and neighbors from the coming insurrection while praying that his own slaves remain loyal. Thanks to a persuasive ally—Hannah, a house slave, midwife, and matriarch who “knew who fed her”—the Parker slaves resist the temptation to take up arms against their masters. The rebellion is soon quelled, but the new peace is not as amicable as the old: whites regard the slaves with increased suspicion, and the number of innocent slaves slaughtered in the revolt and its aftermath only reinforces the necessity of freedom for the unemancipated. In the decades following the rebellion, the situation improves for some. Hannah’s son Samuel is granted his freedom, a change of position that allows him to join in an unexpected business venture with his former owner. Even so, the old order continues to crumble under the pressures of inequity. Disenfranchised whites, ambitious freemen, agitated slaves, and conflicted plantation owners vie to uphold or overturn the status quo against the backdrop of the approaching war. An ancient Native American legend about a glowing stone that an old Nottoway chief cast into a river long ago figures into the narrative. Wiggins’ prose remains workmanlike, focusing on plot and character with little interest in mood or detail. Her omniscient narrator jumps from player to player within chapters, ensuring that the reader always knows what every relevant character feels at any point. The result highlights the self-serving nature of every political position: slaves who have comfortable situations avoid conflicts, masters tend to think of themselves as benevolent. While always showing the horrendous nature of slavery, Wiggins manages to offer an explanation of how the system can be supported by rational—even moral—people. The reader comes away marveling at how we are all simultaneously the stalwarts and the victims of our moment in history.
An imperfect yet compelling volume that evokes life in Virginia during slavery.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9776614-9-7
Page Count: 182
Publisher: LA Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
