A single mom confronts the possibility that her troubled 4-year-old is the reincarnated spirit of a murdered child.
Thirty-nine-year-old Janie Zimmerman becomes pregnant after an interlude with a stranger while on vacation in Trinidad. Four years later, her son, Noah, is kicked out of preschool because he’s talking about guns, drowning, and the scary parts of the Harry Potter books. He constantly asks Janie if he can go home now and if his other mother is coming soon; he absolutely refuses to take a bath. Attempts to address this situation by visiting psychiatrists and specialists result only in draining Janie’s savings and in a tentative diagnosis of early-onset schizophrenia. In her desperation, she gets out a bottle of bourbon and Googles the words “help” and “another life.” She ends up watching a documentary featuring Dr. Jerome Anderson, "who for many decades has been studying young children who seem to recall details from previous lives.” But Anderson is having troubles of his own. Still staggering from the death of his wife one year earlier, he's been diagnosed with aphasia, a form of dementia that involves the gradual loss of language. Though his work has been jeered at by the scientific community, he's now written a book for the general public which has been accepted for publication by “one of the top editors in the field,” who requires only that he add one more compelling case history. His phone call from Janie Zimmerman will provide that opportunity, but will his mental faculties hold out long enough for the threesome to solve the mystery of Noah’s past? The novel includes many excerpts from a real book called Life Before Life: Children’s Memories of Previous Lives by Jim Tucker—these describe real-life cases of apparently transferred memories.
Guskin’s debut novel tells a sentimental story with a murder mystery at its core, and it's interesting even if you don’t go for the premise.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07642-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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This new Baldwin novel is told by a 19-year-old black girl named Tish in a New York City ghetto about how she fell in love with a young black man, Fonny. He got framed on a rape charge and she got pregnant before they could marry and move into their loft; but Tish and her family Finance a trip to Puerto Rico to track down the rape victim and rescue Fonny, a sculptor with slanted eyes and treasured independence. The book is anomalous for the 1970's with its Raisin in the Sun wholesomeness. It is sometimes saccharine, but it possesses a genuinely sweet and free spirit too. Along with the reflex sprinkles of hate-whitey, there are powerful showdowns between the two black families, and a Frieze of people who — unlike Fonny's father — gave up and "congregated on the garbage heaps of their lives." The style wobbles as Tish mixes street talk with lyricism and polemic and a bogus kind of Young Adult hesitancy. Baldwin slips past the conflict between fighting the garbage heap and settling into a long-gone private chianti-chisel-and-garret idyll, as do Fonny and Tish and the baby. But Baldwin makes the affirmation of the humanity of black people which is all too missing in various kinds of Superfly and sub-fly novels.
Pub Date: May 24, 1974
ISBN: 0307275930
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1974
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
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Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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