Forbath (The Last Hero, 1988, etc.), who died earlier this year, leaves a powerful valedictory based on the real and tragic events precipitated by Portugal's first lodgment in West Africa. In 1482, a caravel dispatched by the Portuguese king to find a sea route to the Indies makes a brief landfall near a mighty river called Zaire by the natives. Leaving the captain's page, 15- year-old Gil Eanes (who's been represented as a royal), to pay the crown's respects to the local chief, the ship sails away, never to return. A talented linguist, Gil impresses the chief and his younger son Mbemba; owing to the enmity of the tribe's juju man, however, he's exiled from the upcountry court to an offshore island well away from established trade routes. Ten years on, the lonely castaway finally flags down another Portuguese vessel. Gil (now with a son by Mbemba's younger sister) gets word of the arrival to Mbemba, who soon after seizes the throne. Eager to learn the art of writing and other of civilization's blessings for his people, the ambitious young prince embraces Catholicism and becomes a vassal of the Portuguese. A decade later, the Portuguese, anxious to settle their new province of Brazil, start casting about for slaves and settle on Mbemba's people, and the Portuguese monarch sends five well-stocked cargo craft to the Kongo (latter-day Zaire). While sanctimonious priests speak of saving souls and building cities on a hill, hard-eyed, well-armed Portuguese soldiers are scouting for bondsmen. Factions long mistrustful of Mbemba rise in rebellion; Gil dies; his son is enslaved; and the Portuguese seize control of the country. Mbemba's penance for the sin of vaulting ambition is to live on as slavers ravage his country and its people. A true adventure brought vividly to live amid the violent social, cultural, and religious conflicts that marked the Dark Continent's first contacts with Europe.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80951-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
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Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in white society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her white persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
High-stakes weepmeister Sparks (A Walk to Remember, 1999, etc.) opts for a happy ending his fourth time out. His writing has improved—though it's still the equivalent of paint-by-numbers—and he makes use this time of at least a vestige of credible psychology.
That vestige involves the deep dark secret—it has something to do with his father's death when son Taylor was nine—that haunts kind, good 36-year-old local contractor Taylor McAden and makes him withdraw from relationships whenever they start getting serious enough to maybe get permanent. He's done this twice before, and now he does it again with pretty and sweet single mother Denise Holton, age 29, who's moved from Atlanta to Taylor's town of Edenton, North Carolina, in order to devote her time more fully to training her four-year-old son Kyle to overcome the peculiar impediment he has that keeps him from achieving normal language acquisition. Okay? When Denise has a car accident in a bad storm, she's rescued by volunteer fireman Taylor—who also rescues little Kyle after he wanders away from his injured mom in the storm. Love blooms in the weeks that follow—until Taylor suddenly begins putting on the brakes. What is it that holds him back, when there just isn't any question but that he loves Denise and vice versa-not to mention that he's "great" with Kyle, just like a father? It will require a couple of near-death experiences (as fireman Taylor bravely risks his life to save others); emotional steadiness from the intelligent, good, true Denise; and the terrible death of a dear and devoted friend before Taylor will come to the point at last of confiding to Denise the terrible memory of how his father died—and the guilt that's been its legacy to Taylor. The psychological dam broken, love will at last be able to flow.
More Hallmarkiana, from a shameless expert in the genre.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2000
ISBN: 0-446-52550-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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