Despite awkward pacing, this compassionate tale effectively illustrates tolerance as lived in reality rather than as an...
A Jewish woman and an African-American boy form an unlikely but meaningful connection in this novel set in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood.
Eleven-year-old Jamal Holden has had a troubled life: six years before, in 1985, he saw his father unjustly and fatally shot, and the cop who did it got away scot-free. Now, his mother’s heart is failing; when she collapses, Jamal pleads for help from the residents of his apartment building, and Chaya Bloom, a widowed, devoutly Jewish woman, calls an ambulance. After Jamal’s mother dies, Chaya decides to take Jamal in and raise him herself. Although she has her doubts about how fit she is to raise a young, African-American Christian boy, she’s convinced that she’s doing right by her own beliefs and the memory of her late husband, a Lubavitch rabbi. Chaya and Jamal’s days are filled with such activities as cooking gefilte fish and visiting the local library at Grand Army Plaza, where Jamal loses himself in books. He charms Chaya with his intelligence and devotion, while Chaya wins him over with her kindness and wry wit, and they forge a deep bond. But that bond is tested by bigotry from Chaya’s snooty, shallow daughter, Fagele; Fagele’s maid, Daisy; Jamal’s violent classmate Stinky; Chaya’s neighbors, and others. Somehow, the two must find a way to survive and thrive. Refreshingly, this story doesn’t shy away from strong emotions or tricky topics, but its best moments hinge on the loving, playful central relationship. When Jamal and Chaya trade banter or just chat about their cares, it feels like an honest portrayal of two very different people who are nonetheless unconditionally devoted to each other. Chaya’s charm is evident in her internal monologues: “ ‘Pleased to meet you,’ Chaya said, thinking that the teacher’s handshake felt like a wet herring in cream sauce.” But Luxenberg is less adept at managing the plot, as most of the problems resolve quickly and a little too neatly; somehow, even the case of Jamal’s father’s murder is resolved in a mere 20 pages.
Despite awkward pacing, this compassionate tale effectively illustrates tolerance as lived in reality rather than as an abstract ideal.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2005
ISBN: 978-1-59926-746-3
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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