Ambitious but only fitfully entertaining or informative.
Ask not what your prep school can do for you, ask what you can do for your prep school.
Journalist and nonfiction writer Badler states that this novel, focusing on John F. Kennedy’s time at the elite Choate School, is mostly based on actual history. Unfortunately, this first-person fictionalized portrait of a mutinous teenage underachiever fizzles. Episodes include gathering a group of fellow muckers to defiantly hold secret meetings before compulsory chapel and wear unsanctioned club pins, an explicit visit to a Harlem bordello, a closeted roommate’s offer of a hand job, and no less than four long dialogues with a Columbia psychologist. Interactions with the large Kennedy clan, particularly eldest brother and golden boy Joe Jr., play a large role. Both Lead Belly and Gertrude Stein parade past, the former having to pass his hat to get paid, the latter to make her famous comment about her hometown and encourage young Jack to write a book about brave politicians. In the end, the adolescent fuming and rebellion feel like a device for showing a future president developing leadership skills, exhibiting strength of character in dealing with his chronically poor health, and expressing strong feelings about the injustice of racial and religious prejudice. Readers can get the same from better conventional biographies without having to pick the invented bits out from the historical ones.
Ambitious but only fitfully entertaining or informative. (author’s note, character bios, timeline, discussion questions, further reading) (Historical fiction. 15-18)Pub Date: May 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-61088-566-9
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Bancroft Press
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
The agenda is never less than obvious, but it’s a powerful tale nonetheless.
Clearly still aiming to shock, Herbstein recasts but does not tone down his debut novel, originally published for adult audiences as Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade (2001).
Punctuating her narrative with rapes (some of which are explicitly described) and other atrocities, from forced cannibalism to a flogging that leaves her scarred and one-eyed, blind old Ama relates her life’s hard story to her increasingly disturbed son Zacharias. He, though still enslaved, had been raised in a white official’s household and forced to suppress memories of his earliest years on the Bahian engenho (sugar plantation). Writing in terse, simple language, the Ghana-born author zigzags between points of view—injecting notes of irony (the slave ship that carries Ama to Brazil is named The Love of Liberty, for instance) and acidly matter-of-fact indictments of the brutality and hypocrisy of white slaveholding Christians. Callously ordered away just as his mother is dying, by the end Zacharias sheds his self-righteous naiveté, returns to calling himself by his birth name Kwame Zumbi and vows to share his true heritage with his own young daughter. Readers will be moved as much by Ama’s intelligence and unwavering sense of self respect as by her hideous experiences.
The agenda is never less than obvious, but it’s a powerful tale nonetheless. (map, cast list, glossary) (Historical fiction. 15 & up)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-88995-470-0
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Red Deer Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
Patient and sophisticated readers will find the story compelling and deeply moving and its heroine unforgettable.
The events of the Anglo-Cherokee War in 1759-60 in South Carolina are brought vividly to modern readers in a meticulously researched tale.
Seventeen-year-old Catriona suffers grievous losses when her parents and brother are murdered by fellow settlers in a raid meant to look like an attack by Cherokee warriors. She is determined not only to escape to a British fort, but to somehow bring the murderers to justice. Traversing unforgiving terrain through Cherokee territory, she is severely wounded and her younger brother killed when they are attacked by a catamount. She is rescued and cared for by Malcolm Craig, who is in hiding for reasons of his own. Eventually, they reach the fort only to find more horrific troubles and deaths. A final meeting with her enemy ends in vengeance if not justice. The plot is dense and filled with violence and unremitting pain. Catie is not a perfect heroine; she doubts her decisions and believes that, like the last of the three Fates of Greek myth, she is the instrument of death. The author has wisely chosen to forgo the use of Colonial-era dialect, but all the elements of the tale are perfectly in keeping with the setting and time.
Patient and sophisticated readers will find the story compelling and deeply moving and its heroine unforgettable. (author’s note, sources) (Historical fiction. 15-18)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61117-429-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf