The message is not subtle: Adoption is good, abortion should be a legal choice but is basically bad, men can be nice but are...
Separated by decades, three women face difficult choices about motherhood.
Redmond (Babes in Captivity, 2004, etc.) keeps her heroines’ stories separate for most of the novel, but readers will decipher the heavy-handed connections early on. Present-day Cait, now in her 30s, has been raised lovingly by her adoptive parents, middle-class, suburban Catholics. When she finds herself pregnant and in love with a fellow journalist she’s met while searching for a missing child—unbelievably sensitive Martin is married but his wife is a shrew and may be cheating on him too—she decides she must find her birth mother. In 1976 California, 19-year-old Billie is orphaned when her drugged-out father dies, but she finds letters that lead her to her wealthy grandmother Maude, a selfish but charming old woman dependent on her housekeeper Bridget. Billie moves into Maude’s Manhattan mansion as Maude's heir. She also begins to sleep with her African-American bisexual best friend Jupe. When she gets pregnant, medical student Jupe says he’s not ready to have a baby. Billie gives birth, suffers postpartum depression, is disowned by racist Maude and leaves the baby girl with Bridget. In 1916, Bridget is a newly arrived Irish nanny caring for Maude’s first son. A former Ziegfeld girl now married to a wealthy Jewish candy manufacturer, Maude runs in a suffragette circle and pays little attention to her baby, but when he dies suddenly she is distraught. Bridget is her main support, but Bridget is being wooed by George, Maude’s former chauffeur. Maude fires Bridget when she becomes pregnant and marries George. After his death in World War I, Bridget and her son are penniless. Maude takes her back on the condition that she can raise Bridget’s son as her own. By the time modern Cait has her baby, she is in the bosom of her family, genetic and adoptive.
The message is not subtle: Adoption is good, abortion should be a legal choice but is basically bad, men can be nice but are basically irrelevant.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1642-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
© 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.
