A choppy narrative that fails to dovetail either the family’s story with the historical context or the realistic and...
Baker’s third novel (after Once Two Heroes, 2003) is a family saga about three generations of freed African-Americans who work their own land in the English colony of South Carolina.
Jasper Merian has been given his freedom, but is forced to leave his wife and son in Virginia, still enslaved. Before he can hack out part of the Carolinian wilderness as his property, the 29-year-old Merian must do battle with a fearsome creature that haunts the area because it was denied burial. After dealing with the supernatural, the practical Merian acquires a mule and a woman, both necessary for survival. Wife number two bears him a son, Purchase, but is outraged by Merian’s plan to fetch his first wife, Ruth. Fortunately for domestic harmony, his plan fails; Ruth dies a slave, but years later their son Magnus will join Merian at Stonehouses. By now Merian is a prosperous farmer and Purchase a skillful smith who has forged a magical, fortune-telling sword. It will be his outstanding achievement. Soon after he will fall for Mary Josepha, wife of a revivalist preacher, and turn into a lovesick fool, chasing her up North. Later Purchase will ship their small boy Caleum down to Stonehouses. The absentee father creates a big hole in the saga, which offers few of the rewards of the genre as it degenerates into loosely assembled episodes. Slavery flares briefly as an issue when Magnus, Merian’s successor as owner of Stonehouses, is forced to be a temporary slaveowner. The Revolutionary War is handled just as briefly, when the now grown Caleum fights magnificently at Saratoga, where he loses a leg. Recuperating in New York City, he settles down with a waitress, though he has a wife back home. Then, hey presto, he abandons the waitress and returns home, where the ghostly fiend must again be vanquished.
A choppy narrative that fails to dovetail either the family’s story with the historical context or the realistic and supernatural elements.Pub Date: July 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-8021-1829-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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