Companion novel to Hegi’s Oprah-anointed Stones from the River (1994, etc.): an ambitious, multigenerational story about identity, fate, and the dark side of seemingly benign visions that dutifully plods through the years, detailing as it goes along the schematic lives of the Blau family held hostage to the Wasserburg, a once grand apartment building. Thirteen-year-old Stefan Blau runs away from Germany in 1894 and winds up in Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. There, he opens a restaurant and dreams of building a splendid apartment house on the lake shore (Wasserburg means —water fortress—). The place is built, but Stefan’s first and second wives die in childbirth, leaving him visionary Greta and moody Tobias to rear. Stefan decides to send for his old friend Helene; she will be wife number three and raise his children, though he is determined to have no more. Angered by being used, Helene tricks Stefan into impregnating her and thereby produces Robert. By the 1950s, the Wasserburg is famous for its splendor, filled with a colorful assortment of people as well as Blau family members, and seemingly destined to last forever. But of course it won’t and, for plot purposes, can’t. From childhood on, Emma Blau, Robert’s daughter, has felt she was —the center of the house,” holding it together—an impression that leads her to deceive her family, defraud her brother, have a futile affair, and bear an illegitimate son while she struggles to save the building from its inevitable ruin as money runs out and the structure deteriorates. She (unconvincingly) comes to her senses on the last page of a dull, lifeless tale whose characters are as much in thrall to the plot as the Blaus are to the Wasserburg. Hegi seems to be going through the motions here, aspiring to profundity no doubt but achieving only a tired gothic reprise of hubris and folly.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-82997-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
At the intriguing crossroads of the seen and the unseen lies a weave among five generations of women.
A conjure woman who escaped slavery obliquely guides her descendants in 2017 New Orleans.
This second novel from Sexton confirms the storytelling gifts she displayed in her lushly readable debut, A Kind of Freedom. The new book opens as cash-strapped Ava Jackson is reluctantly moving herself and her 12-year-old son, King, into the mansion of a declining Martha Dufrene, her white grandmother. The first sentence—“It was King who told me we forgot the photograph”—suggests this object will matter. And indeed, Ava goes back for the portrait of Miss Josephine, her “grandmother’s great-grandmother,” a woman with second sight. Her part in the secret sect “the revisioners” is shrouded in time, but Josephine serves as the spine of this deftly structured novel. In one thread of chapters, she narrates her 1855 escape from bondage as a child and, in another, her rise to rural matriarch. In the framed 1924 photo, a widowed Josephine stands on the edge of her farm: “I still find new mercy in the fact this house belongs to me; that the pine boards overlap to keep the rodents out; the windows swing all the way open.” But this is the year that an aging Josephine makes the mistake of pitying a white neighbor, Charlotte, who confides that she married her brutish husband because “her mama said that he wore nice shoes, that his mama had all her teeth.” A third braid of chapters follows Ava, letting the reader slowly grasp a parallel treachery coiled in Martha and Charlotte. Martha’s creepy home conjures its own Get Out–flavored claustrophobia, and Charlotte eventually cozies up to the Klan. In this wondrous telling, King can lie on the sofa playing Fortnite in the same short book where Josephine’s fleeing family is hobbling “the other horses whose shoes need to be damaged so no one could follow us straight away.”
At the intriguing crossroads of the seen and the unseen lies a weave among five generations of women.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64009-258-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.
High adventure fraught with cliffhanger twists marks this runaway-slave narrative, which leaps, sails, and soars from Caribbean cane fields to the fringes of the frozen Arctic and across a whole ocean.
It's 1830 on the island of Barbados, and a 12-year-old slave named George Washington Black wakes up every hot morning to cruelties administered to him and other black men, women, and children toiling on a sugar plantation owned by the coldblooded Erasmus Wilde. Christopher, one of Erasmus’ brothers, is a flamboyant oddball with insatiable curiosity toward scientific matters and enlightened views on social progress. Upon first encountering young Wash, Christopher, also known as Titch, insists on acquiring him from his brother as his personal valet and research assistant. Neither Erasmus nor Wash is pleased by this transaction, and one of the Wildes' cousins, the dour, mysterious Philip, is baffled by it. But then Philip kills himself in Wash’s presence, and Christopher, knowing the boy will be unjustly blamed and executed for the death, activates his hot air balloon, the Cloud-cutter, to carry both himself and Wash northward into a turbulent storm. So begins one of the most unconventional escapes from slavery ever chronicled as Wash and Titch lose their balloon but are carried the rest of the way to America by a ship co-captained by German-born twins of wildly differing temperaments. Once in Norfolk, Virginia, they meet with a sexton with a scientific interest in dead tissue and a moral interest in ferrying other runaway slaves through the Underground Railroad. Rather than join them on their journey, Wash continues to travel with Titch for a reunion with the Wildes' father, an Arctic explorer, north of Canada. Their odyssey takes even more unexpected turns, and soon Wash finds himself alone and adrift in the unfamiliar world as “a disfigured black boy with a scientific turn of mind…running, always running from the dimmest of shadows.” Canadian novelist Edugyan (Half-Blood Blues, 2012, etc.) displays as much ingenuity and resourcefulness as her main characters in spinning this yarn, and the reader’s expectations are upended almost as often as her hero’s.
A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52142-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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