An unusual look at racism through the lens of Colonial America.
This coming-of-age tale charts the troubled early life of a boy from India in 17th-century Virginia.
When his courtesan mother dies from cholera, an 11-year-old who goes by the name Tony soon loses the guidance of her British patron and the easy life on southeastern India’s Coromandel Coast. The patron arranges for Tony to sail to London, but while there, he’s waylaid by child snatchers and shipped off to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1635 on a vessel carrying other kidnapped kids and indentured workers. Looking back from “years later,” Tony narrates his misfortunes with soulful resignation and his scant pleasures with youthful delight. His nemesis is a sadistic, sexually abusive White farm overseer, but the boy soon learns that he faces a more enduring problem. While he sees himself in a racial limbo, neither White nor Black nor “tawny” like the local Indians, his brown skin places him nearer the losing end of the Colonies’ caste system. He escapes farm labor by talking his way into working with a physician, yet he remains essentially an indentured servant and soon comes to realize that no amount of medical knowledge will grant him the same respect as a White man. Charry, who came to the U.S. from India in 1999, writes in an author’s note that Tony is based on “the earliest-known mention” of an East Indian worker in Colonial North America. But this quasi-historical novel is less concerned with period details of speech, clothing, crafts, or furniture than with the human interactions that affect an “in-between and indeterminate” person like Tony—and doubtless his followers of the Indian diaspora. In a charming touch, he sometimes recalls a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream he saw in London and takes comfort in how Titania values an Indian boy.
An unusual look at racism through the lens of Colonial America.Pub Date: May 9, 2023
ISBN: 9781668004524
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
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