A novel that offers an original, compelling facet of the African-American female experience.
In Tewogbade’s debut novel, Garnett, an African-American woman, immigrates with her husband to his home in Nigeria and struggles with the values of a tribal society.
Garnett was raised by her grandmother in a Brooklyn, N.Y., housing project, and at first glance, her pampered life as the wife of Kayode, a Nigerian banker, seems like a success story. However, her domestic life becomes unsettled when she doesn’t become pregnant. As a result, she faces her husband’s disappointment; her meddling mother-in-law also disapproves and reminds Garnett that she’s “a wife of this family not just my son.” Other dark clouds hover, as well; her husband’s sketchy financial dealings and infidelities add to her teetering self-worth and fear of losing him to a “junior wife.” It may be hard for readers to stomach the low expectations that Garnett has for her marriage, but the author paints the character’s complexities and dichotomies honestly and realistically. Garnett excels in her work as a clothing boutique owner and displays inner strength, but she also feels that her present reality may one day be stolen away—and in the end, she’s right. She eventually stands up to her husband but at a great cost; when Kayode forbids Garnett from leaving the country, she draws on the survival methods of her childhood to quickly develop a plan. Tewogbade portrays Nigerian culture and Garnett’s daily life in flowery, metaphorical prose, and at times, the narrative overuses foreshadowing, which often deflates the tension. That said, Tewogbade provides a rare window into how women live in a society where they’re considered the property of their husbands. It’s refreshing to see even a fictional story of an African-American woman’s experience in Africa; many of Garnett’s Brooklyn friends romanticize the continent as the motherland, but she discovers that it brings her none of the comforts of home.
A novel that offers an original, compelling facet of the African-American female experience.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491094181
Page Count: 252
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Back to a Jurassic Park sideshow for another immensely entertaining adventure, this fashioned from the loose ends of Crichton's 1990 bestseller. Six years after the lethal rampage that closed the primordial zoo offshore Costa Rica, there are reports of strange beasts in widely separated Central American venues. Intrigued by the rumors, Richard Levine, a brilliant but arrogant paleontologist, goes in search of what he hopes will prove a lost world. Aided by state-of- the-art equipment, Levine finds a likely Costa Rican outpostbut quickly comes to grief, having disregarded the warnings of mathematician Ian Malcolm (the sequel's only holdover character). Malcolm and engineer Doc Thorne organize a rescue mission whose ranks include mechanical whiz Eddie Carr and Sarah Harding, a biologist doing fieldwork with predatory mammals in East Africa. The party of four is unexpectedly augmented by two children, Kelly Curtis, a 13-year-old "brainer," and Arby Benton, a black computer genius, age 11. Once on the coastal island, the deliverance crew soon links up with an unchastened Levine and locates the hush-hush genetics lab complex used to stock the ill- fated Jurassic Park with triceratops, tyrannosaurs, velociraptors, etc. Meanwhile, a mad amoral scientist and his own group, in pursuit of extinct creatures for biotech experiments, have also landed on the mysterious island. As it turns out, the prehistoric fauna is hostile to outsiders, and so the good guys as well as their malefic counterparts spend considerable time running through the triple-canopy jungle in justifiable terror. The far-from-dumb brutes exact a gruesomely heavy toll before the infinitely resourceful white-hat interlopers make their final breakout. Pell-mell action and hairbreadth escapes, plus periodic commentary on the uses and abuses of science: the admirable Crichton keeps the pot boiling throughout.
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41946-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
A super-exorcism that leaves the taste of somebody else's blood in your mouth and what a bad taste it is. King presents us with the riddle of a small Maine town that has been deserted overnight. Where did all the down-Easters go? Matter of fact, they're still there but they only get up at sundown. . . for a warm drink. . . .Ben Mears, a novelist, returns to Salem's Lot (pop. 1319), the hometown he hasn't seen since he was four years old, where he falls for a young painter who admires his books (what happens to her shouldn't happen to a Martian). Odd things are manifested. Someone rents the ghastly old Marsten mansion, closed since a horrible double murder-suicide in 1939; a dog is found impaled on a spiked fence; a healthy boy dies of anemia in one week and his brother vanishes. Ben displays tremendous calm considering that you're left to face a corpse that sits up after an autopsy and sinks its fangs into the coroner's neck. . . . Vampirism, necrophilia, et dreadful alia rather overplayed by the author of Carrie (1974).
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1975
ISBN: 0385007515
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1975
PERSPECTIVES
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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