An intriguing, if overloaded, version of the Odyssey.
Honduran refugee Penelope shares the story of her life and her husband, Ulysses, a Native American who becomes a warrior in Vietnam, in this debut work of contemporary fiction.
In a Native American lodge in Eastern Oregon, Penelope, an “elder” in the Sundown family, wishes to relate the “ancient story” of the Odyssey but is urged to tell the tale of “our people and your life” instead. And so begins her first-person recounting of her birth in Honduras in 1954, her experience as a child sex slave for the M-13 gang, and her eventual escape to the Pacific Northwest. In this new world, she meets Ulysses Looking Glass “Ulee” Sundown, a pastor’s son and talented athlete, albeit with a growing record of violence. Both are 15 when Ulee kills a visiting M-13 thug and then signs up to serve in Vietnam to avoid second-degree murder charges. He becomes a skilled killer soldier yet also helps out at a local orphanage. Penelope proposes to Ulysses on leave, but he soon annuls the marriage, believing he’ll die in combat in Vietnam. Penelope gives birth to their son, Telemachus, and studies to become a doctor. The lovers finally reunite and remarry in the 1970s, after Ulee has fought in Israel and escaped a POW camp, among other exploits. They move for a time to Los Angeles for Penelope’s medical career, with Ulee by turns a professional football player, Olympics track medal winner, and impassioned minister. Penelope eventually returns to Honduras to build medical facilities, where she faces figures from her past. White (Astoundingly Joyful, Amazingly Simple, 2012, etc.), the senior pastor of Washington Cathedral in Redmond, weaves a rich tapestry of minority and marginalized experiences into his sophomore fiction effort. His updating of Homer is by turns amusing (a modern-day Telemachus) and astute (“Vietnam was an addiction, just as the Trojan War was for his namesake”). Yet the narrative struggles under the weight of its competing protagonists and multiple plot strands, with Penelope’s horrible childhood as well as adult showdown in the Honduras, for example, rather hurriedly conveyed as well as eclipsed by Ulee’s many intense and dramatic adventures.
An intriguing, if overloaded, version of the Odyssey.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63393-296-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
© 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
