by Randy Michael Signor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 29, 2017
A powerful historical novel that offers a remarkable meditation on the persistence of racial hatred.
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Three intersecting stories spanning a century revolve around racial tension in a small Kansas town.
The major plotlines in this book are divided by time but united by geography, as all three are set in the small city of Osawatomie, Kansas. One story—which functions as the spine of the narrative—begins in 1854, and is narrated by Sarah Dawson, whose Caucasian family moved from Tennessee to score some land opened up by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. However, tensions between those in favor of slavery and those opposed to it roil the area and force the Dawsons, who’ve never owned slaves, to take sides. Then the abolitionist agitator John Brown moves to town, spoiling for a fight and adding fuel to an already simmering fire. Sarah begins a romantic relationship with Brown’s son, Oliver, and soon becomes pregnant. In 1954, a young white boy, John David, navigates his school’s social scene, which has been transformed into a political tinderbox by the era’s racial conflict. Fast-forward to late 1960, as John David and his bigoted white friend Woody pick up a peripatetic African-American woman looking to find money to get her brother out of jail. Debut author Signor subtly constructs a world that’s infused with fear and volatility. In the 1954 storyline, for instance, John David has a close African-American friend, Jaimie, whose father languishes in jail, and another classmate’s house gets burned down. He also employs prose that describes his world with poetical grace: “You didn’t have to be a full-grown man or woman to know that things were stirred up. It seemed like just about everyone’s skin was on their faces a little tighter, their eyes quicker to dart around.” The story can be confusing at times, however, as the author switches narrative perspectives and time frames too often and too quickly. Overall, though, this is a bold work that’s richly and intelligently drawn.
A powerful historical novel that offers a remarkable meditation on the persistence of racial hatred.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63505-567-2
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Mill City Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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