A fresh, insightful look into being young, smart and biracial in postmillennial America.
Deft, revealing stories about young interracial women struggling for self-identity in an increasingly mixed culture, frequently in the company of men who have little interest in questioning the things they do.
A writer for our time, Senna (Where Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History, 2009, etc.) draws openly upon her life as the beautiful light-skinned daughter of an African American father and white Irish-American mother (both of whom are writers and activists). This book rises to even greater heights than Senna's 1998 novel Caucasia in probing the variously disappointing but still hopeful lives of striving young women, most boasting babies, troubled friends and detached husbands. Livy, a Brooklyn artist living with a gallery owner in Santa Fe, mourns the loss of her old unsettled self after a divorced New York friend visits her. Cassie, a playwright from Rhode Island temporarily living in Los Angeles with her artist husband, obsesses over the ultra-exclusive and ultra-expensive preschool to which their child has miraculously been accepted. Jackie, daughter of a black saxophonist and white singer—"the missing link between Sicily and Libya"—withdraws into a strange existence with an abandoned dog after being dumped by a black boyfriend who is against race-mixing. Lara, a New Yorker who writes for The Charitable American magazine, questions her outlook after meeting with a downtrodden young woman who claims she is her daughter. With the exception of a story told nearly verbatim three times, each with altered details and viewpoints, Senna writes with effortless control and surpassing understanding of her characters' tics and neurotic tendencies. Employing the issue of racial identity as a leitmotif, she creates stories whose interconnections hum. Now that we have an interracial president, the issues faced by people of mixed heritage are getting more attention. With humor and honest emotion, Senna educates us on what it means to be mistaken for white, or black, and the presumptions that go with those mistakes.
A fresh, insightful look into being young, smart and biracial in postmillennial America.Pub Date: May 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59448-507-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Told through the points of view of the four Garcia sisters- Carla, Sandi, Yolanda and Sofia-this perceptive first novel by poet Alvarez tells of a wealthy family exiled from the Dominican Republic after a failed coup, and how the daughters come of age, weathering the cultural and class transitions from privileged Dominicans to New York Hispanic immigrants. Brought up under strict social mores, the move to the States provides the girls a welcome escape from the pampered, overbearingly protective society in which they were raised, although subjecting them to other types of discrimination. Each rises to the challenge in her own way, as do their parents, Mami (Laura) and Papi (Carlos). The novel unfolds back through time, a complete picture accruing gradually as a series of stories recounts various incidents, beginning with ``Antojos'' (roughly translated ``cravings''), about Yolanda's return to the island after an absence of five years. Against the advice of her relatives, who fear for the safety of a young woman traveling the countryside alone, Yolanda heads out in a borrowed car in pursuit of some guavas and returns with a renewed understanding of stringent class differences. ``The Kiss,'' one of Sofia's stories, tells how she, married against her father's wishes, tries to keep family ties open by visiting yearly on her father's birthday with her young son. And in ``Trespass,'' Carla finds herself the victim of ignorance and prejudice a year after the Garcias have arrived in America, culminating with a pervert trying to lure her into his car. In perhaps one of the most deft and magical stories, ``Still Lives,'' young Sandi has an extraordinary first art lesson and becomes the inspiration for a statue of the Virgin: ``Dona Charito took the lot of us native children in hand Saturday mornings nine to twelve to put Art into us like Jesus into the heathen.'' The tradition and safety of the Old World are just part of the tradeoff that comes with the freedom and choice in the New. Alvarez manages to bring to attention many of the issues-serious and light-that immigrant families face, portraying them with sensitivity and, at times, an enjoyable, mischievous sense.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-945575-57-2
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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