More compelling and less hokey than one might expect.
Taylor (Lady of Spain, 1992, etc.) examines hard times in the early-20th-century South—and the music that resulted.
The story isn’t so much about Blind Singer Joe, a young Caucasian bluesman, as it is about his mother, Hannah Ruth Bayless. A poor girl whose only resources are her natural beauty and vocal ability, young Hannah marries a good-looking scoundrel who leaves before Joe’s birth and returns sporadically. She works as maid to the Holts, a rich family whose daughter Amelia recognizes and nurtures Hannah’s musical gifts, and who is perhaps falling in love with her. Amelia’s brother Emmett also has an eye for Hannah; he gets her pregnant and then ignores her. Amelia raises baby Alex, Joe’s half-brother, as her own, establishing a class division between Hannah’s two sons. In short chapters with short paragraphs and sentences and lots of dialogue (but no quotation marks), the narrative details a generational progression of splintered families: children abandoned by one or both parents, siblings who die of disease, violence or suicide. Inevitably, Hannah leaves Joe to establish a career with her second husband, a gifted fiddler named Pink Miracle, but her music remains in Joe’s blood. In the late-1930s prelude and coda that frame Hannah’s story, Joe is a street musician in the Deep Ellum neighborhood of Dallas, knowing there’s some resentment of him as a white man playing the blues, though he’s as blind to race as he is to everything else. While he connects with both Pink and Alex and learns of a stepsister, Joe knows that he is essentially on his own in a world where everyone is ultimately alone. His insights should strike a responsive chord among fans of rural blues and country music.
More compelling and less hokey than one might expect.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2006
ISBN: 0-87074-511-5
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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