Still, despite occasional clunkiness, Miller’s vernacular style is altogether winning in a story that seriously tries to...
Personal tragedy puts a Jamaican child-care provider on the road to ruin—in a contrived, sometimes overwrought, and jazzily accented debut.
Indigo Rosemartin’s young daughter Louisa is killed by a hit-and-run driver back in Kingston, while Indigo is in the States trying to earn money to send home. Indigo’s grief, compounded by her guilt at having left the fatherless girl home while she works for a professor’s family in suburban Chicago, hardens her heart against the three American girls of various ages she tends house for daily—as well as against the friends who care about and live around her, and the male admirers she refuses to give the time of day. The girls, Clair, Jill, and Julie Silver, are growing up without their own mother, a kind of dopey, unstable hypochondriac who calls regularly to threaten custody proceedings and terrorize her daughters. Professor Silver, a 50ish bookworm who studies generations of refugees, especially Jews who suffered in death camps, rarely looks up from his all-consuming work to gauge the goings-on in the household. Gradually, Indigo begins to frequent a gambling house run by the infamous charmer Brother Man, a ruthless criminal and thug who enjoys getting rough with the ladies who fall in his debt—and Indigo has lost her head to roulette. Miller’s Jamaican characters ring proud and true and speak in a sing-song patois that seems almost too musically delightful to possess the pain of suffering from homesickness, poverty, or spiritual impoverishment. Indigo has to make her way “back to caring”—for friends, for the sweet girls in her care, who depend on her, and for an acceptable life for herself. While her journey is affecting, it’s also rather unsurprising and platitudinous: the author isn’t prepared to get rough enough herself to create a viscerally convincing tale.
Still, despite occasional clunkiness, Miller’s vernacular style is altogether winning in a story that seriously tries to examine the depression of foreign caregivers.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2004
ISBN: 0-553-80396-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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