A feast for mind and heart.
Second-novelist Ozeki (My Year of Meats, 1998) shifts her focus to potatoes in this full-course meal of a story about family farmers, environmental activists, and corporate agribusinessmen whose interests collide on a farm in Liberty Falls, Idaho.
Retired potato farmer and semi-invalid Lloyd Fuller and his Japanese wife Momo, who suffers from advancing Alzheimer’s, have sold most of their acreage to their daughter Yumi’s childhood friend Cass and her husband, but they still run a small catalogue seed company out of Momo’s garden. No one has seen Yumi since she ran away at 14 after Lloyd found out about her “affair” with history teacher Elliot Rhodes, but when Lloyd suffers a heart attack, Cass tracks her down. Yumi, now a part-time college teacher and real-estate developer in Hawaii, arrives at the farm with her three children (from three fathers) so full of unresolved angst that she barely registers the emotional crisis quietly brewing within Cass over her childlessness and a recent bout of cancer. Soon the Seeds of Resistance, a troop of eco-activists, show up and proclaim Lloyd, whose Christian fundamentalist beliefs about life’s sacred nature mesh with their own New Age-y ones, their new guru. Yumi finds herself the outsider as the Seeds care for her ailing father, charm her kids, and help Momo catalogue her seeds before memory fades completely. Meanwhile, Elliot, now a p.r. flack for an agribusiness, is sent to Idaho to push one of its products that the Seeds happen to be protesting. Yumi and Elliot reconnect, though this time it’s Elliot who is smitten. Lloyd’s health deteriorates, the Seeds plan a major action, and Elliot’s agribusiness operatives run amok. Liberty Falls becomes the intersection of intense personal drama—romantic and familial—and intense eco-political (both economic and ecological) theatrics. Add a thorough history of American potato farming and a huge cast of characters, most fully realized and heart-wrenching in their imperfect yearnings.
A feast for mind and heart.Pub Date: March 10, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03091-0
Page Count: 417
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
