Refusing to challenge her characters, Cleage (Seen It All and Done the Rest, 2008, etc.) undermines an exciting premise.
A charismatic minister’s apostasy threatens his daughter’s political ambitions.
Ida B. Wells Dunbar, 34, was a tireless Obama campaign worker. Now, post-Inauguration, she’s languishing in D.C. awaiting a White House job offer. Has something sunk her prospects with the new administration? Could that iceberg be her father, Reverend Horace Dunbar, aka the “Rev,” Atlanta’s most revered and influential churchman and civil-rights leader since Dr. King? He castigated candidate Obama for distancing himself from the Rev’s friend Jeremiah Wright, and his diatribe has been immortalized on YouTube. When a family friend asks Ida to intervene, she reluctantly returns to her old neighborhood (and familiar Cleage setting), Atlanta’s West End, a crime-ridden slum turned gentrified African-American utopia. There, she’s fêted with mountains of down-home cuisine, provisioned by the many community gardens that have rendered the West End even more self-sustaining. Her father’s loyal sidekick Ed Harper is chief gardener, but his primary function is accompanying the Rev to speaking engagements, more numerous than ever during Black History Month. The Rev’s defection from Obama’s camp is doubly puzzling, since he and Ed spearheaded a voter-registration campaign that mustered more than 100,000 new African-American Democrats to the polls in November. Now, encouraged by the Rev’s seeming turnabout, corporate backers of the Party of No see an opportunity. If they can filch the Rev’s list of new registrants, they could disqualify them all on bogus grounds in time for the midterm elections. The conservatives easily co-opt Ed’s son Wes, an amoral, opportunistic WASP-wannabe who forsook the West End for Eton and the Ivy League. Can Wes, whose womanizing fits in with the rest of his stereotypical villainy, fool Ida (who pined for him in childhood) into thinking he’s after her, not her father’s list?
Refusing to challenge her characters, Cleage (Seen It All and Done the Rest, 2008, etc.) undermines an exciting premise.Pub Date: April 20, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-345-50637-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extremely powerful story of a young Southern Negro, from his late high school days through three years of college to his life in Harlem.
His early training prepared him for a life of humility before white men, but through injustices- large and small, he came to realize that he was an "invisible man". People saw in him only a reflection of their preconceived ideas of what he was, denied his individuality, and ultimately did not see him at all. This theme, which has implications far beyond the obvious racial parallel, is skillfully handled. The incidents of the story are wholly absorbing. The boy's dismissal from college because of an innocent mistake, his shocked reaction to the anonymity of the North and to Harlem, his nightmare experiences on a one-day job in a paint factory and in the hospital, his lightning success as the Harlem leader of a communistic organization known as the Brotherhood, his involvement in black versus white and black versus black clashes and his disillusion and understanding of his invisibility- all climax naturally in scenes of violence and riot, followed by a retreat which is both literal and figurative. Parts of this experience may have been told before, but never with such freshness, intensity and power.
This is Ellison's first novel, but he has complete control of his story and his style. Watch it.
Pub Date: April 7, 1952
ISBN: 0679732764
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1952
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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APPRECIATIONS
Nobody writing today surpasses the precocious Waters’s virtuosic handling of narrative complexity and thickly textured...
Imagine a university-educated lesbian Charles Dickens with a similarly keen eye for mendacity and melodrama, and you’ll have some idea of the pleasures lurking in Waters’s impudent revisionist historicals: Tipping the Velvet (1999), Affinity (2000), and now this richly woven tale of duplicity, passion, and lots of other good stuff.
It begins as the narrative of 17-year-old Susan Trinder, an orphan resident of the criminal domicile run by Hogarthian Grace Sucksby, a Fagin-like “farmer” of discarded infants and den-mother to an extended family of “fingersmiths” (i.e., pickpockets) and assorted confidence-persons. One of the latter, Richard Rivers (a.k.a. “Gentleman”), engages Susan in an elaborate plot to fleece wealthy old Mr. Lilly, a connoisseur of rare books—as lady’s maid “Susan Smith” to Lilly’s niece and ward Maude, a “simple, natural” innocent who will be married off to “Mr. Rivers,” then disposed of in a madhouse, while the conspirators share her wealth. Maidservant and mistress grow unexpectedly close, until Gentleman’s real plan—a surprise no reader will see coming—leads to a retelling of events we’ve just witnessed, from a second viewpoint—which reveals the truth about Mr. Lilly’s bibliomania, and discloses to a second heroine that “Your life was not the life that you were meant to live.” (Misdirections and reversals are essential components of Waters’s brilliant plot, which must not be given away.) Further intrigues, escapes, and revelations climax when Susan (who has resumed her place as narrator) returns from her bizarre ordeal to Mrs. Sucksby’s welcoming den of iniquity, and a final twist of the knife precipitates another crime and its punishment, astonishing discoveries about both Maude and Susan (among others), and a muted reconciliation scene that ingeniously reshapes the conclusion of Dickens’s Great Expectations.
Nobody writing today surpasses the precocious Waters’s virtuosic handling of narrative complexity and thickly textured period detail. This is a marvelous novel.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2002
ISBN: 1-57322-203-8
Page Count: 493
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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