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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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