An engrossing, heartbreakingly real novel of the South.
In Argo’s (The Courage to Kill, 2013, etc.) novel, set at the dawn of the civil rights movement, an earnest white teenager tries to figure out what kind of man he will become.
Growing up fatherless in a cash-strapped Alabama family is hard enough on 16-year-old Sonny Poe. But when he and a buddy accidentally witness a lurid backwoods lynching, things become decidedly more complex. Suddenly, he’s ducking members of the local Ku Klux Klan as he attempts to carry on more mundane pursuits, such as chasing girls, delivering newspapers and saving for a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Into Sonny’s hard-pressed life steps Joe Peach, a local dentist with a painful past and a crusading spirit. “Dr. Joe” takes Sonny under his wing, but Sonny’s secret knowledge of backwoods violence plagues him. The budding friendship becomes more fraught when Dr. Joe is assigned a job to weed out local government corruption. Violence, and the threat of violence, continues to dog Sonny as he and Dr. Joe dig deeper into a police-sanctioned scam targeting the oppressed black community. Will Sonny rise to the challenge? Could any teen in his predicament prevail? In a style that’s evocative of S.E. Hinton’s classic works, with a dash of Daniel Woodrell’s Southern grit, Argo successfully creates a profound, multilayered tapestry that’s full of nuance. Sonny’s first-person perspective creates a fragile aura around the unfolding events and makes them wholly unpredictable; although he’s steadfast and true, Sonny is still a teenager, capable of wrecking his buddy’s car. The authentic dialogue is especially effective; each restrained syllable conveys as much as a five-page soliloquy, as when Sonny, after receiving a horrific beating, says that he’s “[g]ood. Been better, but good.”
An engrossing, heartbreakingly real novel of the South.Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9894035-7-3
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Cliff Edge Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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