A fast-paced if uneven depiction of racial injustice in the segregated South.
After a 16-year-old black girl is convicted of killing her employer in 1912 Virginia, a young white journalist becomes embroiled in the aftermath.
Howell uses the real-life story of Virginia Christian as the basis for his debut novel, which is told from the perspective of Charlie Mears, the reporter assigned to cover her story. After a white woman, Ida Belote, is found beaten and dead, an all-white jury quickly finds her “washwoman,” Virgie, guilty of the murder, despite serious ambiguity about what transpired. It’s clear from the start that Virgie doesn’t understand the direness of her situation. “Daddy gone come, fetch me out of here?” she asks Charlie the first time he goes to the jail to interview her. “It’s best not to talk,” he warns her. “Not to anybody but your lawyer.” The “white savior” who swoops in to rescue people of color is a trope well past its expiration date, and readers may feel that Charlie’s seemingly inherent goodness (what reporter would tell an interviewee not to talk?) edges the narrative a bit too much in that direction. But it’s Charlie’s inability to effect change, not any heroic action, which drives the story. Indeed, the novel works best after the trial has ended, when Charlie is forced to decide how to make his way forward as a civil rights–minded writer. At times Howell gets bogged down in historical detail, and Charlie’s burgeoning romance with one of Ida Belote’s daughters plays out predictably. Regardless, Howell knows how to hold readers’ attention, and Christian’s story is an important reminder of the horrors of Jim Crow: she was the only female juvenile ever executed in Virginia, dying in the electric chair a day after her 17th birthday.
A fast-paced if uneven depiction of racial injustice in the segregated South.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-58838-317-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: NewSouth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy,...
Britisher Haddon debuts in the adult novel with the bittersweet tale of a 15-year-old autistic who’s also a math genius.
Christopher Boone has had some bad knocks: his mother has died (well, she went to the hospital and never came back), and soon after he found a neighbor’s dog on the front lawn, slain by a garden fork stuck through it. A teacher said that he should write something that he “would like to read himself”—and so he embarks on this book, a murder mystery that will reveal who killed Mrs. Shears’s dog. First off, though, is a night in jail for hitting the policeman who questions him about the dog (the cop made the mistake of grabbing the boy by the arm when he can’t stand to be touched—any more than he can stand the colors yellow or brown, or not knowing what’s going to happen next). Christopher’s father bails him out but forbids his doing any more “detecting” about the dog-murder. When Christopher disobeys (and writes about it in his book), a fight ensues and his father confiscates the book. In time, detective-Christopher finds it, along with certain other clues that reveal a very great deal indeed about his mother’s “death,” his father’s own part in it—and the murder of the dog. Calming himself by doing roots, cubes, prime numbers, and math problems in his head, Christopher runs away, braves a train-ride to London, and finds—his mother. How can this be? Read and see. Neither parent, if truth be told, is the least bit prepossessing or more than a cutout. Christopher, though, with pet rat Toby in his pocket and advanced “maths” in his head, is another matter indeed, and readers will cheer when, way precociously, he takes his A-level maths and does brilliantly.
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy, moving, and likely to be a smash.Pub Date: June 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50945-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
A fable about the consolatory and strengthening powers of religion flounders about somewhere inside this unconventional coming-of-age tale, which was shortlisted for Canada’s Governor General’s Award. The story is told in retrospect by Piscine Molitor Patel (named for a swimming pool, thereafter fortuitously nicknamed “Pi”), years after he was shipwrecked when his parents, who owned a zoo in India, were attempting to emigrate, with their menagerie, to Canada. During 227 days at sea spent in a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger (mostly with the latter, which had efficiently slaughtered its fellow beasts), Pi found serenity and courage in his faith: a frequently reiterated amalgam of Muslim, Hindu, and Christian beliefs. The story of his later life, education, and mission rounds out, but does not improve upon, the alternately suspenseful and whimsical account of Pi’s ordeal at sea—which offers the best reason for reading this otherwise preachy and somewhat redundant story of his Life.
Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100811-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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