An action-packed, heartbreaking, and eye-opening debut from a great new talent.
A Nigerian boy struggles to survive in a violent, disintegrating world.
Like the most famous coming-of-age-in-hell story of all, Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, Nigerian lawyer and political commentator John’s debut novel makes an old nightmare new by placing a bright, articulate, curious, and endearing young narrator in the midst of it. Dantala Ahmad—his name means “born on a Tuesday”—struggles to learn how the world works, to understand friendship, love, and sex, and to pursue his drive for knowledge and self-expression while living in the thick of wholesale mayhem and death. (Though this is a novel, the acknowledgments explain that the character was inspired by a real person “who will probably never read this book.”) Dantala is an almajiri—an Arabic word used in Nigeria for a child who has left his home to study Islam—who gives an account of his life from 2003 to 2010. The opening finds him smoking “wee-wee” with a gang of street kids under a tree—he's been hanging out with them for about two years, since he finished his Quranic training and didn’t have the fare for the bus home to his village. Paid to cause trouble during an election, some of the boys are murdered; others scatter. Dantala ends up at a mosque run by a kind, peace-loving imam named Sheikh Jamal. Sheikh recognizes Dantala’s intelligence and good nature and makes him a key assistant, managing funds, singing the call to prayer, studying computer skills and English. Some of the most touching, Anne Frank–like portions of the novel are excerpts of a notebook in which Dantala meditates on new vocabulary words like PATRON, GIBBERISH, OBSESS, and WHY, including his thoughts on everything from the bizarre confusions of Islamic sectarianism to his emerging sexuality and burning crush on Sheikh’s daughter. As further political conflict erupts, Dantala must battle insanity, ignorance, and brutality in his attempt to find a place in the world.
An action-packed, heartbreaking, and eye-opening debut from a great new talent.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2482-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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