A vivid historical epic that’s expansive in scope yet intimate in focus.
In this novel, a businesswoman at a personal and professional crossroads discovers that the secrets of her past may help her solve problems in her turbulent present.
At 31, Alissia Aruba Saxton has a life that many would envy. She works for an import company in the United States and has a devoted fiance named Tom. While she places a premium on responsibility, she also yearns for the casual spontaneity of Aruba, the island of her birth. Shortly before her wedding, she fights with Tom, makes mistakes at work, and suffers from nightmares. Believing her present problems are rooted in her past, she returns to Aruba, where she reconnects with her mother’s dear friend Rika and recalls the people and places that shaped her life. Her father, Stass, worked for the oil refinery, and her mother, Nessa, was a housewife whose dreams of attending college were thwarted by the high cost of education. Alissia was an observant child who spent much of her time exploring the island with her friend Eddie Williams and observing the men who worked with her father. However, her memories of the island also have a dark side—one that comes into focus when she examines the lingering effects of an assault and her role in a mysterious death. Novinger’s (Intercultural Communication, 2001, etc.) novel is a sweeping historical epic that explores themes of memory, guilt, and responsibility while introducing an unforgettable heroine. Throughout, Alissia is haunted by one simple question: “Is my paradise something I made up?” Her search leads to revelations that are shocking and thought-provoking. The island setting plays an important part in the novel, as well, and Novinger creates a richly detailed portrait of Aruba in the 1940s and ’50s, highlighting aspects of everyday life and showing the importance of the oil industry to the local economy.
A vivid historical epic that’s expansive in scope yet intimate in focus.Pub Date: March 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-983723-89-6
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Morpho Publishing, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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