The promise of a dreamlike fantasy lapses slowly but surely into a soporific narrative.
An Air Force enlistee's curiosity about the occult leads him across Europe on a journey of New Age self-discovery.
Davis is both author and hero of this semi-autobiographical sequel to his first novel, Buchi (2006). “Spook,” as Spirit’s Air Force pals playfully call him, has known since he was a child that he was “different”–and not just because of his parents’ unorthodox choice of name. On a visit to Great Yarmouth on England’s eastern shore in 1961, the youthful Spirit finds himself being drawn to the small storefront of “Madam Logos, Fortune Teller–Astrologer–Psychic.” Inside, he meets octogenarian Athena Logos, who informs Spirit that he is indeed “different”: Spirit is an empath, able to psychically probe the innermost feelings of others. Athena and Spirit begin weekly excursions into worlds of astrology and metaphysics to prepare him for some special “purpose” to which he is destined. Before long, a series of visions and “vibes” begins to make Spirit suspect there’s more to this typecast old fortuneteller than meets the eye. Why does Athena refuse to meet his friends? Who is the strange young woman who keeps appearing to him in visions and dreams? When Athena’s sudden disappearance leaves him without a friend and guide, he sets out to the ancient ruins of the Temple of Poseidon in Greece in search of answers. Coming to his aid are a cast of friends, both skeptical and credulous, who nevertheless offer their full emotional support to him in his journey. Author Davis invests a great deal of warmth and bonhomie in Spirit’s friendships, but therein lies a critical misstep: Spirit’s encounters with other characters are so genial and good-natured that no real conflict–interpersonal or otherwise–mars Spirit’s breezy progression to finding the answers to his questions. Stories of self-discovery thrive on struggle, but here the protagonist need only “go with the flow” to arrive at journey’s end.
The promise of a dreamlike fantasy lapses slowly but surely into a soporific narrative.Pub Date: April 24, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4257-2953-0
Page Count: 204
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
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