Despite an unwieldy narrative and overly intricate plot: an extremely readable and interesting portrait of a lost time and...
Second-novelist Perry (Stigmata, 1998) follows the fortunes and travails of an upwardly mobile African-American clan across much of the country and most of the 20th century.
The saga opens in Johnson Creek, Alabama, in the early 1900s, when rural blacks live in a segregated world immensely harsher but in some ways far richer than that of their white neighbors. Frank and Joy Mobley are an unusual couple in many ways: Frank is an American Indian of the Creek tribe; Joy is the daughter of a woman born in Africa who lived most of her life as a slave. With 70 acres of good farmland and two houses, the Mobleys are quite well off by the standards of their black neighbors, and they have high expectations for their three daughters, Grace, Mary Nell, and Eva. But fate has a way of interfering. All three girls turn out to possess “the sight”: they’re given to visions, dreams, and aural hallucinations that offer them glimpses of the future. Frank and Joy do their best to discourage their daughters’ belief in what they see as an embarrassing peasant superstition Joy’s mother brought over from Africa, but the girls soon find themselves called upon for advice and prophecies and develop a small cult following in the region. Domestic life in a family of clairvoyants can be difficult, however, as Mary Nell discovers when she “sees” Eva being raped by her husband. Unable to bear children of her own, she counsels her sister to go through with the resulting pregnancy—and steals the baby boy after he’s born. The siblings break up, reunite, and part again over the years, eventually making peace after a great deal of turmoil and heartbreak. The gift of the sight binds them in the end—to each other and to their ancestors.
Despite an unwieldy narrative and overly intricate plot: an extremely readable and interesting portrait of a lost time and place.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7868-6807-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
A compelling, beautifully rendered tale of passion and pain.
Rome, past and present, serves as the setting for a sparkling historical novel.
Smith (Free Men, 2016, etc.) bounds through 2,000 years of history, following four indelible characters as they grapple with questions of faith, freedom, and transgressive love. Tom, a biologist working in contemporary Rome, is studying ostracods, tiny crustaceans that thrive in polluted, agitated environments. “Are they adapting in the face of disadvantage or are they opportunists of collapse?” Tom asks, aware that his question about ostracods could just as well apply to his own emotional agitation. The married father of a 9-year-old daughter, he has met a young woman who enchants him, impelling him to confront his desperate desire for “an unleashing” and for a love deeper than what he feels for his wife. A child playing in the water where he is investigating suddenly shrieks in pain, pierced by a piece of bent metal, “scaly with corrosion, its silver marred with patches of orange rust.” It is a fishhook—maybe a castoff with no value or perhaps an ancient relic: uncanny, miraculous. The fishhook reappears as Smith leaps back to the Renaissance, where it falls into the hands of Giulia, a mixed-race princess newly married to a Medici, pregnant with another man’s child. For Giulia, her fortunes embroiled in political and religious rivalries, the fishhook evokes a holier time, before corruption and hypocrisy sullied the church. In ninth-century Rome, Felix, a 60-year-old monk, is tormented by his youthful, forbidden love for Tomaso; assigned to watch over the decaying bodies in the putridarium, Felix comes into possession of the fishhook, guessing—wishing—that it belonged to the martyred St. Prisca, who perhaps “got it direct from Jesus.” In the year 165, Prisca did indeed find the hook, secreting it as a precious token. Drawn to worshipping Christ rather than pagan gods, 12-year-old Prisca stands defiant against her violent tormenters. Perhaps Smith’s most appealing character is Satan, whose weary, ironic comments punctuate a narrative that shines with lyrical, translucent prose.
A compelling, beautifully rendered tale of passion and pain.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-287364-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
Melodramatic for sure, but the author manages to avoid stereotypes while maintaining a brisk pace.
Irish orphan finds a new family among slaves in Grissom’s pulse-quickening debut.
Lavinia is only six in 1791, when her parents die aboard ship and the captain, James Pyke, brings her to work as an indentured servant at Tall Oaks, his Virginia plantation. Pyke’s illegitimate daughter Belle, chief cook (and alternate narrator with Lavinia), takes reluctant charge of the little white girl. Belle and the other house slaves, including Mama Mae and Papa George, their son Ben, grizzled Uncle Jacob and youngsters Beattie and Fanny, soon embrace Lavinia as their own. Otherwise, life at Tall Oaks is grim. Pyke’s wife Martha sinks deeper into laudanum addiction during the captain’s long absences. Brutal, drunken overseer Rankin starves and beats the field slaves. The Pykes’ 11-year-old son Marshall “accidentally” causes his young sister Sally’s death, and Ben is horribly mutilated by Rankin. When Martha, distraught over Sally, ignores her infant son Campbell, Lavinia bonds with the baby, as well as with Sukey, daughter of Campbell’s black wet nurse Dory. Captain Pyke’s trip to Philadelphia to find a husband for Belle proves disastrous; Dory and Campbell die of yellow fever, and Pyke contracts a chronic infection that will eventually kill him. Marshall is sent to boarding school, but returns from time to time to wreak havoc, which includes raping Belle, whom he doesn’t know is his half-sister. After the captain dies, through a convoluted convergence of events, Lavinia marries Marshall and at 17 becomes the mistress of Tall Oaks. At first her savior, Marshall is soon Lavinia’s jailer. Kindly neighboring farmer Will rescues several Tall Oaks slaves, among them Ben and Belle, who, unbeknownst to all, was emancipated by the captain years ago. As Rankin and Marshall outdo each other in infamy, the stage is set for a breathless but excruciatingly attenuated denouement.
Melodramatic for sure, but the author manages to avoid stereotypes while maintaining a brisk pace.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5366-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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