Lengthy coming-of-age set apart by the hero’s African identity, but never is the willful Midnight believable as a...
A young Sudanese immigrant struggles to hold onto his traditional values while growing up on New York’s meanest streets.
Fleeing Africa at age seven with his young pregnant mother, Umma, the boy later known as Midnight is not seeking a better life so much as hiding out from the political fallout of his powerful father’s role in the Sudanese government. Adrift without any friends or much money, the once-wealthy family has to start fresh, forcing Midnight to act as de facto patriarch of the clan. They first settle in a Brooklyn housing project, where gentle Umma creates a peaceful Islamic household in a neighborhood that is anything but. Midnight quickly learns to defend himself from the gangsters, drug dealers and other unsavory characters who populate his hood, while protecting Umma and his baby sister Naja. Home schooled, he escorts his veiled mother to and from her sweatshop job, helps her start a lucrative handmade clothing business and studies martial arts at a Japanese dojo. He also purchases two guns, and in his early teens stalks and shoots a shady Jamaican who lusts after Umma. Highly motivated (to say the least), Midnight also excels at basketball and takes a part-time job at a Chinatown fish market to help save up to buy a house for his family in a less dangerous neighborhood. It is in Chinatown that he meets Akemi, a lovely 16-year-old Japanese art student. Their language barrier is no match for their hormones, but Midnight courts her properly, adhering as best he can to his Muslim principles. Obstacles abound for their teenage love, including her rich father back in Japan and the many local young ladies ready to offer everything to the strapping youth. In spite of its interesting point of view, Souljah’s latest (The Coldest Winter Ever, 1999, etc.) reads more like a setup for future volumes than a freestanding cohesive story.
Lengthy coming-of-age set apart by the hero’s African identity, but never is the willful Midnight believable as a 14-year-old.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4518-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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