An earnest, worthy, well-crafted debut.
Human-rights activist Freeman considers selfhood, desire and social status in her first novel.
Purchased as a five-year-old and taken to a wealthy home in Colombo, Latha is raised to be a companion and servant to Thara. The girls are the same age, they live in the same house, but they grow up at opposite ends of Sri Lanka’s rigid class system. Latha gets encouragement from a teacher with communist leanings, and she takes inspiration from the example of Princess Diana, who worked as a nanny before she became royalty. Ultimately, though, she ends up using one of the only forms of power generally available to disenfranchised women: When her employers refuse to give her any of the money she has supposedly earned so that she can buy new shoes, she takes her revenge by seducing the upper-class boy Thara loves. This relationship does not work out quite the way it would on the soap operas that provide Latha with all her knowledge of romance. Meanwhile, Biso travels from the city to the countryside with her three children. She is fleeing her husband, who has murdered her lover. During her journey, she recalls the series of events that brought her to this unfortunate pass. Freeman does an outstanding job of depicting tragically circumscribed lives without turning her characters into cartoonish victims; the childhood scenes between Latha and Thara are especially subtle explorations of class dynamics. Latha is utterly aware of the disparity between her experience and that of her “mistress,” but she is—in the way of adolescents everywhere—too vain to be cowed. Thara’s unselfconscious sense of entitlement gives her relationship with Latha complex depths, and that relationship, in turn, reveals a great deal about the fluid, often paradoxical bond between ruler and ruled. Although Freeman has been an advocate for women and workers, she does not lecture the reader; she lets the story and her characters speak for themselves.
An earnest, worthy, well-crafted debut.Pub Date: July 21, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0195-7
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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