Both an engrossing tale and an effective call to action about a rarely discussed minority.
An activist and author explores the plight of African albinos in this story of a young Tanzanian.
Translated from the original Italian, this “work of fiction based on true events” sees the African albino experience through the eyes of a Tanzanian girl named Adimu. Upon first seeing her shockingly white skin, Adimu’s father simply declares: “It has to die.” The prejudice against these Zeru Zerus—or phantoms or nobodies, as they are sometimes called—is so strong that all the other women at the birth recoil, calling the baby a dark omen and demanding that she be abandoned far from the village. But after a shocking test of fate, the infant’s loving grandmother Nkamba is allowed to raise her. Threats lurk constantly in the shadows against the ostracized Adimu and her grandmother; a failed kidnapping attempt leads to the intervention of Charles and Sarah Fielding, a wealthy white couple living on an island. Sarah is smitten with the child and wants to raise her as her own, but like many men in the story, Charles sees the baby as an opportunity. Believed to hold dark magic, the body of an older Zeru Zeru is a commodity that can be sold on the black market for great sums of money—even enough to save Charles’ failing mining company. Gentili’s (I, Maria Bellofiore, 2009) primary goal as the founder of Help African Albinos is to raise awareness for the very real issues of racism and human trafficking affecting people like Adimu, but he has also crafted a compelling novel. The author carefully constructs the superstitious and hostile world of the village but also populates it with several believable and complex inhabitants. He strives to show the difficulty these characters have reconciling their beliefs and motivations with Adimu’s existence as a real person. The multiple dangers that befall the sweet main character provide a surprising amount of suspense and shock while the inner turmoil of Nkamba and Charles offers deep, emotionally charged storylines.
Both an engrossing tale and an effective call to action about a rarely discussed minority.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 282
Publisher: #HelpAfricanAlbinos
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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