An interesting subject that would have benefited from better execution.
In Oliveira’s first novel, an ambitious young woman finds love and professional fulfillment while amputating limbs during the Civil War.
Mary Sutter is a midwife—a very good one—but she wants more. She wants to be a doctor, but 19th-cetunry mores won’t permit it. When the nation divides in bloody conflict, Mary seizes the opportunity to learn medicine—and flee from the pain she experiences when a man she loves marries her more conventionally feminine twin, Jenny. The book has many elements that make for compelling historical fiction, but issues with pacing and dialogue are evident from the beginning. The novel’s opening scene features an expectant mother exhausted and endangered by a difficult delivery, which should provide a dramatic means of showing Mary’s expertise and dedication to her craft. Instead, both the heroine and her author demonstrate a lack of interest in this woman’s perilous state. Mary harangues the attending physician—the man she is determined to make her mentor—and Oliviera diffuses this tense, life-and-death scene with lengthy passages of exposition. The rest of the novel is similarly disappointing. Oliveira’s knowledge of social, military and medical history seems sound, but her skill as a writer does not match her skill as a researcher.
An interesting subject that would have benefited from better execution.Pub Date: May 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02167-3
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
The final, luminous chapter is six pages that will take your breath away.
A frontier tale dazzles with camels and wolves and two characters who never quite meet.
Eight years after Obreht’s sensational debut, The Tiger’s Wife (2011), she returns with a novel saturated in enough realism and magic to make the ghost of Gabriel García Márquez grin. She keeps her penchant for animals and the dead but switches up centuries and continents. Having won an Orange Prize for The Tiger’s Wife, a mesmerizing 20th-century Balkan folktale, Obreht cuts her new story from a mythmaking swatch of the Arizona Territory in 1893. The book alternates between the narratives of two complex, beset protagonists: Lurie, an orphan and outcast who killed a boy, and Nora, a prickly frontierswoman with her own guilty conscience. Both speak to the dead. Lurie sees ghosts from early childhood and acquires their “wants,” while Nora keeps up a running conversation with her daughter, Evelyn, dead of heatstroke as a baby but aging into a fine young woman in her mother’s mind. Obreht throws readers into the swift river of her imagination—it takes a while to realize that Lurie is addressing all his remarks to a camel. The land is gripped by terrible drought. As Nora’s homestead desiccates, her husband leaves in search of water, and her older sons bolt after an explosive dispute. An indignant local drunk wonders whether “anybody else in this town [had] read an almanac or history in their lives? What were they all doing here, watching the sky, farming rock and dust?” Still, a deep stoicism, flinty humor, and awe at the natural world pervade these characters. They are both treacherous and good company. Here is Nora, hyperaware of a man who’s not her husband: “Foremost on her mind: the flimsiness of her unlaundered shirt and the weight of her boots.” Lurie, hiding among the U.S. Army’s camel cavaliers (you can look them up), is dogged down the years by Arkansas Marshal John Berger. Their encounters mystify both men. Meanwhile, there are head lice, marvelous, dueling newspaper editorials, and a mute granny with her part to play.
The final, luminous chapter is six pages that will take your breath away.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9286-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Chicana writer Castillo (whose reputation until now has been mostly regional) brings a warm, sometimes biting but not bitter feminist consciousness to the wondrous, tragic, and engaging lives of a New Mexico mother and her four fated daughters. Poor Sofi! Abandoned by her gambler husband to raise four unusual girls who tend to rise from adversity only to find disaster. ``La Loca,'' dead at age three, comes back to life—but is unable to bear the smell of human beings; Esperanza succeeds as a TV anchorwoman—but is less successful with her exploitative lover and disappears during the Gulf War; promiscuous, barhopping Caridad—mutilated and left for dead—makes a miraculous recovery, but her life on earth will still be cut short by passion; and the seemingly self-controlled Fe is so efficient that ``even when she lost her mind [upon being jilted]...she did it without a second's hesitation.'' Sofi's life-solution is to found an organization M.O.M.A.S. (Mothers of Martyrs and Saints), while Castillo tries to solve the question of minority-writer aesthetics: Should a work of literature provide a mirror for marginalized identity? Should it celebrate and preserve threatened culture? Should it be politically progressive? Should the writer aim for art, social improvement, or simple entertainment? Castillo tries to do it all—and for the most part succeeds. Storytelling skills and humor allow Castillo to integrate essaylike folklore sections (herbal curing, saint carving, cooking)—while political material (community organizing, toxic chemicals, feminism, the Gulf War) is delivered with unabashed directness and usually disarming charm.
Pub Date: April 17, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03490-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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