If this isn’t the Great American Novel, it's a mighty attempt at achieving one.
A sprawling, ambitious debut novel that is as impassioned in promoting Black women’s autonomy as it is insistent on acknowledging our common humanity.
Ailey Pearl Garfield, the protagonist of this epochal saga, is a compelling mélange of intellectual curiosity, scathing observation, and volatile emotion. Though her grandmother may have preferred that she join the parade of medical doctors in their family, Ailey is destined to become a historian. Her journey toward that goal, fraught with heartache, upheaval, and conflict from her childhood through adolescence and collegiate years, is interwoven with the results of her inquiry into her family history. That history is deeply rooted in the Georgia town of Chicasetta, where Ailey’s Black ancestors were enslaved and exploited by a “White Man with Strange Eyes” named Samuel Pinchard, who not only brutalized and demeaned his slaves, but also haphazardly procreated with them over the decades before the Civil War. The “songs” interspersed throughout the book, chronicling in vivid, sometimes-graphic detail the antebellum lives of Ailey’s forbears, are bridges linking Ailey’s own coming-of-age travails in what is referred to only as the City. Precocious, outspoken, and sensitive, Ailey often tests the patience of the grown-ups in her life, especially her parents, Geoff and Belle, whose own arduous passage to love and marriage through the 1950s and '60s is among the many subplots crowding this capacious, time-traversing narrative. The story always swerves back to Chicasetta, where Ailey spends her summers, and her encounters with friends and relations, the most notable of whom is her beloved Uncle Root, a retired professor at a historically Black college where he’d first made the acquaintance of the novel’s eponymous scholar/activist. In her first novel, Jeffers, a celebrated poet, manages the difficult task of blending the sweeping with the intimate, and, as in most big books, she risks stress-testing some of her own narrative threads. Still, the sturdiest of those threads can throb with haunting poignancy, as in the account of Ailey’s promising-but-troubled sister, Lydia, which can stand alone as a masterful deconstruction of addiction’s origins and outcomes.
If this isn’t the Great American Novel, it's a mighty attempt at achieving one.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-294-293-7
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Bold, thoughtful, and delicate at once, addressing life’s biggest questions through artfully crafted scenes and characters.
A sweeping exploration of choice, chance, class, race, and genetic engineering in three generations of a Chinese American family.
Khong’s follow-up to her sweet, slim debut—Goodbye, Vitamin (2017)—is again about parents and children but on a more ambitious scale, portraying three generations in what feel like three linked novellas, or somehow also like three connected gardens. The first begins in 1999 New York City, where Lily Chen stands next to a man at an office party who wins a big-screen TV in the raffle. He insists she take it; he is Matthew Maier, heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, and has all the TVs he needs. On their first date, they go to Paris after dinner, and as this section ends, they’ve had their first child. The second part of the book moves to 2021 on an island off the coast of Washington state. It’s narrated by Lily’s now-15-year-old son, Nick; his father is nowhere in sight, at least for now. The closing section unfolds in 2030 in the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s told by Lily’s now elderly mother, May, with an extended flashback to her youth in China during the Cultural Revolution and her first years in the U.S. As a budding scientist, May was fascinated by genetics. Of the lotus flowers she studied at university, she observes, “Raindrop-shaped buds held petals that crept closer, each day, to unfurling. As humans we were made of the same stuff, but their nucleotides were coded such that they grew round, green leaves instead of our human organs, our beating hearts.” This concern for how and why we turn out the way we do animates the book on every level, and along with science, social constructs like race and class play major roles. Every character is dear, and every one of them makes big mistakes, causing a ripple effect of anger and estrangement that we watch with dismay, and hope.
Bold, thoughtful, and delicate at once, addressing life’s biggest questions through artfully crafted scenes and characters.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780593537251
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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