A raw, sensual odyssey of sex and faith in chaotic, alluring modern-day West Africa.
Thorpe’s (Incompetence, 2015) vivid, impressionistic novel about a Westerner’s strange travels around Mali.
Hank Westland, an American convert to Islam, lives a dissolute life in Bamako, Mali, getting drunk every night and bedding a procession of African women. But his mind is elsewhere, far away; in Timbuktu, his friend professor Kati has been accused of sorcery by a Tuareg extremist militant group called Ansar Dine, and he’s being held in a captivity that he may not survive. Westland wants to travel to save his friend, but first he must go see Al Hajj Tidjani, the leader of the Umarian Tidjanniya order that the American has recently joined as a new convert. He arrives at the compound and greets the wily, enigmatic leader, his wives, and their various daughters; their worldview, inspired by idiosyncratic readings of the Quran and the Hadith, quickly begins to challenge his complacency on a variety of issues. As a Christian minister’s son, he’d spent years teaching at a college in the Pacific Northwest, a laid-back, easygoing area where “a bumper-sticker often seen around town read, ‘Mean People Suck.’ ” By contrast, Westland reflects about West Africa, “You lived here in one day more than most people did in twenty years in the U.S.” His experiences in the camp reel wildly from his usual priapism to steep discussions of various Islamic subjects; an in-camp circumcision scene, though, may have every male reader reflexively wincing. Thorpe’s narrative is lushly sensuous, wonderfully capturing the textures and contradictions of Muslim life in Mali and also offering thought-provoking digressions into the nature of Islam (“The true hajj does not mean traveling to Mecca,” Westland learns at one point, for example. “The true hajj is the hajj to the point of mercy at the very center of your spiritual being”). The result is a somewhat jumbled but instantly memorable novel in the spirit of Paul Bowles’ work.
A raw, sensual odyssey of sex and faith in chaotic, alluring modern-day West Africa.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5075-5000-7
Page Count: 248
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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