A poetic debut of biblical proportions.
A retelling of Noah’s Ark centered around Noah’s wife, Naamah—the woman who helped reshape the world with her hands.
“When someone dies and you forget how they look or how they laughed, that is how they forgot the land.” So begins the story of Naamah, Noah, and their family after the Great Flood. In the wake of the devastation, the family must grapple with the world they’ve left behind, survive their current reality, and prepare for the future. Headstrong and protective, Naamah struggles while on the ark: with caring for the animals, missing the land, losing her lover (and friend), and questioning her faith. Naamah’s inability to trust God or his plan pulses through the novel. She can’t understand why everything had to die, why Noah and she were chosen to repopulate the Earth, or what will happen when (or if) the waters recede. Naamah does not possess blind faith; she is angry and distrustful of Him and what He has done and can do. While discussing motherhood with one of her son’s wives, she asks herself if God fully understands the ramifications of what he’s done: “Naamah wonders if God has considered this: women so distrustful of Him that they might never bear children for the new world.” Blake’s writing is deeply feminist. Whether she's focused on giving birth or having sex, Blake sketches the female body and experience in all its gore and glory. In the biblical tradition, reality, dreams, and visions blur and bleed together. Naamah enters other people's dreams, spirits visit her on Earth, and she spends hours exploring beneath the floodwaters. Comprised of mesmerizing prose poem–esque sections, the novel explores themes of sexuality, purpose, loss, love, and faith.
A poetic debut of biblical proportions.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53633-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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