Acrobatic storytelling, both out there and down-home.
A woman heads to Big Sky Country with some unusual baggage—actual, metaphorical, and psychological.
As LaValle’s beguiling, genre-blending fifth novel opens, it’s 1915, and something so awful has happened to Adelaide Henry’s parents that she’s set the family’s California farmhouse ablaze with their corpses inside. With little but rumor to go on, she high-tails it to Montana, believing the state will be welcoming toward a young Black woman with farming skills and an urge to erase an ugly past. Early on, she seems proven right—the residents of Big Sandy are friendly, supportive, and not too inquisitive about what’s inside her unusually heavy steamer trunk. But in time the region’s secretive nature comes into view, starting with a woman with four blind children who prove to be at the center of a host of deceits. And once the contents of that steamer trunk are unleashed, Adelaide is further pushed into self-preservation mode than she already was as the sole Black woman in a very White and very cold place. LaValle is prodigiously talented at playing with stylistic modes, and here he deftly combines Western, suspense, supernatural, and horror—his prose is unfussy and plainspoken, which makes it easier to seamlessly skate across genres. But LaValle’s fluidity when it comes to style is balanced by a focused thematic vision: Through Adelaide (and that steamer trunk), he explores isolation and division across race, within families, and through communities. Her struggle to find her place is complicated by everyone being tight-lipped and eager to create pariahs. (“The silence is the worst part of this suffering,” as Adelaide puts it.) The closing chapters get somewhat knotted as LaValle labors to corral a Pandora’s box full of plot points. But the novel overall is a winning blend of brains and (occasionally violent) thrills.
Acrobatic storytelling, both out there and down-home.Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780525512080
Page Count: 304
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.
An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work.
At the end of Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey departed Ireland for the second and final time—headed back to New York and the Italian American husband she had secretly married after first traveling there for work. In her hometown of Enniscorthy, she left behind Jim Farrell, a young man she’d fallen in love with during her visit, and the inevitable gossip about her conduct. Tóibín’s 11th novel introduces readers to Eilis 20 years later, in 1976, still married to Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbia with their two teenage children. But Eilis’ seemingly placid existence is disturbed when a stranger confronts her, accusing Tony of having an affair with his wife—now pregnant—and threatening to leave the baby on their doorstep. “She’d known men like this in Ireland,” Tóibín writes. “Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house.” This shock sends Eilis back to Enniscorthy for a visit—or perhaps a longer stay. (Eilis’ motives are as inscrutable as ever, even to herself.) She finds the never-married Jim managing his late father’s pub; unbeknownst to Eilis (and the town), he’s become involved with her widowed friend Nancy, who struggles to maintain the family chip shop. Eilis herself appears different to her old friends: “Something had happened to her in America,” Nancy concludes. Although the novel begins with a soap-operatic confrontation—and ends with a dramatic denouement, as Eilis’ fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton—the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s.
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781476785110
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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