Ambitious, and usually on the mark: a novel that demands the reader’s participation, and that repays it well.
A richly detailed historical novel, set in a nation drifting toward civil war, that picks up where Kingman’s Not Yet Drown’d (2007) leaves off.
Grace Pollocke is a woman of parts: An artist of much accomplishment, raised in Europe and the Indies, she serves on the home front in Philadelphia while her seafaring husband wrests their fortune from the ports of Asia. Out there on the main, a young African American woman has been making her mark as well, and she returns to the New World with the promise that the silkworms in her hold can bring new wealth to a homegrown industry growing ever more reliant on slave-picked cotton. And there’s a rub, for Anibaddh Lyngdoh, it turns out, has released herself from slavery on her own recognizance—“taking of her freedom,” as one character says, “all those years ago in Scotland”—and now she’s caught up in the intricacies of the law concerning runaway slaves, since no good deed goes unpunished. Enter Grace, whose family history is bound up in Anibaddh’s in ways of which she is only dimly aware, and who turns up a few secrets as she learns more about those crossed destinies. Kingman works in the big ideas of slavery and complicity in it, skillfully depicting, for instance, the self-deceptions that afford one good Christian gentleman in Virginia biblical approval of the curious institution of human enslavement. Kingman channels the conventions of period prose into her own, so that her novel proceeds at the very leisurely, pre-television, pre-automobile pace of 19th-century storytelling. Her prose, too, is perhaps more stately than is the contemporary norm, as when she writes of Grace, “She preferred to blow out the candle when they made love, not from bashfulness, but to retire her eyes, just temporarily; to retire the greedy domineering eyes which swamped all the senses otherwise.” The reader unused to such slow and careful language may be impatient at turns, but, as Frederick Busch does in The Night Inspector, set in about the same time, Kingman handles it well and without anachronism.
Ambitious, and usually on the mark: a novel that demands the reader’s participation, and that repays it well.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-06547-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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