A purposeful and absorbing exploration across dark and rocky terrain.
A headstrong teenager becomes a slave in this debut novel.
As a 6-year-old, Repentance lost her little brother to the overlords. Ten years later, on the day of her buttoning ceremony (an arranged marriage), she refuses her betrothed. She vows never to have children of her own who can be taken away. Instead, she forfeits her freedom. Her decision seems irrational. It shames her family and condemns her betrothed, Sober. The two of them are enslaved. They are taken from their village’s foggy swamps to the ice city of the overlords. Here, Repentance learns the true cost of her defiance. She has become property—a human possession to be done with as the overlords see fit. Slaves who try to escape are punished with death and their families taken as compensation. Sober is beaten; Repentance is sold to a brothel. She despairs for herself but even more for her sister should Repentance continue to buck the overlords. More than ever, her situation seems hopeless. And then she catches the eye of the old king. Apokedak crafts a rounded fantasy world—from the village with its superstitions and traditions to the city with its magical cloths. But for all of its exotic settings, this book is concerned primarily with slavery. Human dignity is the prevalent theme. Iniquities flourish, and Repentance, though a strong-willed protagonist, is faced with a disheartening truth: that fighting against the system will not always make things better. The story in this sense is a difficult read. But its subject matter is leavened by clear prose and well-drawn minor characters. Repentance finds something genuine in the people she meets. She questions her choices and, through the strength of others, finds hope, of sorts, even in situations where none should exist. This may not be enough to sustain some readers, but the author has paced events nicely. As Sober comes back into Repentance’s life, the plot both tightens and unravels. By the third act, readers should hope, fear, and thrill to the prospect of a happy ending.
A purposeful and absorbing exploration across dark and rocky terrain.Pub Date: July 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-947446-00-7
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Paraklesis Press
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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