Engaging, poignant, and historically informative.
Tewogbade’s (During a Dry Season, 2013) novel portrays a turbulent African-American family living in Atlanta during the deadly riots of 1906.
Thirty-eight years after ratification of the 14th Amendment, which officially freed the slaves, race riots broke out in Atlanta. Stirred up by stories in white-owned newspapers of alleged rapes of white women by black men, armed white gangs took to the streets, burning black-owned homes and businesses, raping and beating black women, and lynching black men. This novel begins nearly two weeks before the riots. Queen Isabella Redmond, the matriarch of an African-American Georgia family, is in her youngest daughter Ruby Norris’ dirt-floor house, acting as midwife during the birth of the 17-year-old’s first baby. Ruby’s husband, Lee Norris, is currently in jail, working a chain gang, after being arrested for “so-called reckless eyeballing.” Isabella gasps when she sees that her new grandchild’s skin is white, and she feels that Ruby has disgraced the family. Her oldest daughter, Beatrice, lives across town in the neighborhood of Brownsville with her husband, JC, a teacher. They and Isabella’s son, Fat, are the most prosperous members of the family. The fourth sibling, Mary Alice, returns to the city unexpectedly after having disappeared seven years ago; the light-skinned woman had been “passing” as white and living in New York City until her fiance tried to strangle her. But shortly after she arrives in Atlanta, the street violence begins. In this novel, Tewogbade depicts the atrocities of the rioting in graphic detail, as when she describes the white mobs who “paraded severed ears, fingers, and toes through the streets, and hung the hats of lynched bodies on lamp poles.” In this way, she effectively brings across the unspeakable horror of a real-life event. However, the soul of the novel is to be found in the larger family drama—tales of sibling rivalries and vividly portrayed daily struggles against poverty and racial oppression. The characters are shown to have indomitable spirits and a devotion to family despite the disparate paths that they take. The skillful prose is heavy on dialogue, which will keep readers in the moment.
Engaging, poignant, and historically informative.Pub Date: May 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73221-570-2
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Kaduna River Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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