An educational and fanciful journey through classic stories.
Glinton-Meicholas (Chasing Light, 2013, etc.) offers a culturally rich collection of Bahamian folk tales.
The Bahamas boasts a time-honored tradition of storytelling, and it’s through such short, fantastical tales that many children learn the importance of good manners, humility, respect for elders, the consequences of greed, and the gift of love. In this treasury, Glinton-Meicholas focuses on “the ol’ story,” or the traditional characters and motifs of her birthplace, Cat Island, also known as Guanima. These folk tales feature brief musical interludes or “sings,” often used to announce a main character or plot twist, to heighten tension, or to serve as call and response between characters. The players therein are often manifestations of good or evil, intelligence or stupidity, power or weakness. Beneficent behavior is rewarded, and bad behavior is punished; disobedience and selfishness are particularly called out—from the lazy Bouki, who bails on the responsibilities of cow ownership but hoards milk and meat, to a drummer’s son whose urgent need to play the instrument lands him in a dangerous competition with a witch. The author imparts valuable moral lessons through the experiences of tricksters and animals, as in a spiritual parable about the dangers of comparison in “Why the Serpent Has a Cleft Tongue and Crawls on His Belly.” The author carefully explains cultural references in footnotes, such as the meaning of a “fire half” (a hearth) or a “kukumakai” (a magic stick). Throughout, her poetic language evokes powerful visuals: she describes a carriage as “blacker than the heart of a hurricane,” a woman’s skin as “the colour of honey from bees feeding on wild marigolds,” teeth that “sparkled like sea-washed pebbles,” and a dancing couple “as beautiful as a pair of golden banana birds.” The Bahamian lexicon can be challenging to decipher, though; phrases such as “Borry dis, gimme dat! Das all you an’ yuh pa know!” may slow down the reading process.
An educational and fanciful journey through classic stories.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 159
Publisher: Guanima Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a...
Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel—strong and intricate in craft; devastating in impact.
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, this is the story of how former slaves, psychically crippled by years of outrage to their bodies and their humanity, attempt to "beat back the past," while the ghosts and wounds of that past ravage the present. The Ohio house where Sethe and her second daughter, 10-year-old Denver, live in 1873 is "spiteful. Full of a [dead] baby's venom." Sethe's mother-in-law, a good woman who preached freedom to slave minds, has died grieving. It was she who nursed Sethe, the runaway—near death with a newborn—and gave her a brief spell of contentment when Sethe was reunited with her two boys and first baby daughter. But the boys have by now run off, scared, and the murdered first daughter "has palsied the house" with rage. Then to the possessed house comes Paul D., one of the "Pauls" who, along with Sethe, had been a slave on the "Sweet Home" plantation under two owners—one "enlightened," one vicious. (But was there much difference between them?) Sethe will honor Paul D.'s humiliated manhood; Paul D. will banish Sethe's ghost, and hear her stories from the past. But the one story she does not tell him will later drive him away—as it drove away her boys, and as it drove away the neighbors. Before he leaves, Paul D. will be baffled and anxious about Sethe's devotion to the strange, scattered and beautiful lost girl, "Beloved." Then, isolated and alone together for years, the three women will cling to one another as mother, daughter, and sister—found at last and redeemed. Finally, the ex-slave community, rebuilding on ashes, will intervene, and Beloved's tortured vision of a mother's love—refracted through a short nightmare life—will end with her death.
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a victim's dark violence, with a lyrical insistence and a clear sense of the time when a beleaguered peoples' "only grace...was the grace they could imagine."Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1987
ISBN: 9781400033416
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.
Coulter’s treasured FBI agents take on two cases marked by danger and personal involvement.
Dillon Savitch and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, have special abilities that have served them well in law enforcement (Paradox, 2018, etc.). But that doesn't prevent Sherlock’s car from hitting a running man after having been struck by a speeding SUV that runs a red light. The runner, though clearly injured, continues on his way and disappears. Not so the SUV driver, a security engineer for the Bexholt Group, which has ties to government agencies. Sherlock’s own concussion causes memory loss so severe that she doesn’t recognize Savitch or remember their son, Sean. The whole incident seems more suspicious when a blood test from the splatter of the man Sherlock hit reveals that he’s Justice Cummings, an analyst for the CIA. The agency’s refusal to cooperate makes Savitch certain that Bexholt is involved in a deep-laid plot. Meanwhile, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith is visiting friends who run a cafe in the touristy Virginia town of Gaffers Ridge. Hammersmith, who has psychic abilities, is taken aback when he hears in his mind a woman’s cry for help. Reporter Carson DeSilva, who came to the area to interview a Nobel Prize winner, also has psychic abilities, and she overhears the thoughts of Rafer Bodine, a young man who has apparently kidnapped and possibly murdered three teenage girls. Unluckily, she blurts out her thoughts, and she’s snatched and tied up in a cellar by Bodine. Bodine may be a killer, but he’s also the nephew of the sheriff and the son of the local bigwig. So the sheriff arrests Hammersmith and refuses to accept his FBI credentials. Bodine's mother has psychic powers strong enough to kill, but she meets her match in Hammersmith, DeSilva, Savitch, and Sherlock.
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9365-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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