A debut novel describing a troubled young woman’s attempts to sort out the truth of her family’s past. For children, a death in the family is never a simple affair, but some respond to it more vividly than others. Ella lost her father to cancer when she was 15, and she has been a pyromaniac ever since. “What was fire anyway, what was it made of?” she wonders. “Grief, I thought.” First, she set her fires in buckets and bathtubs, but eventually she became a full-fledged arsonist who burned down barns and houses on the sly. Having dropped out of college, Ella now works the front desk at the Linden Hotel in Porter, Indiana, and picks up traveling salesmen by night at the Paradise Lounge. Sometimes she spends the night with them, rarely does she see any man more than once. When her grandfather dies by his own hand (seven years after her father), she decides to track down long-lost Aunt Hanna and break the bad news to her. No one has heard from Hanna for years, and some of the relatives become uneasy when Ella starts asking about her (—Were the fires I—d set some kind of legacy, some fear passed down in the genes?—). In her grandfather’s day, rural Indiana had been Ku Klux Klan territory, and, to some degree, Ella’s haunted by a history even larger than her family’s. When she learns the truth about Hanna, she also discovers that her family has been involved in a deception that she sensed long before she understood. She also realizes, finally, that her impulse to destroy homes is rooted in something deeper than private madness. An intriguing (if overwrought and overwritten) insight into a diseased soul. Purple prose not withstanding (—When the Holy Spirit visited the apostles, and their tongues were in flames, did the voice leave ash in their mouths?—), Steinke has a knack for the macabre.
Pub Date: March 8, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-16150-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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