A talented author to watch as her narrative technique matures.
The Canadian-born Edugyan’s unrelenting debut finds life—first and second—somber and bleak.
Samuel Tyne is an émigré from Ghana (he prefers the old name, Gold Coast) whose midlife crisis is aggravated by a stifling civil service job in Calgary, under the thumb of two bureaucrats he aptly nicknames Dombey and Son. At home, the atmosphere is even more fraught. Samuel and his wife Maud display less mutual tolerance than their warring ancestral tribes. Their twin 12-year-old daughters, Yvette and Chloe (indistinguishable even to their parents), are bad-seed prodigies. A surprise inheritance from Samuel’s estranged uncle Jacob—a dilapidated farmhouse in the small Alberta town of Aster, once settled by African-Americans from Oklahoma—offers respite, but not for long. No sooner does Samuel reinvent himself as an electronics repair-shop owner and early computer hardware developer (it’s 1968) than the twins rev up the RPMs on their continuous destructive loop. The duo defies all civilizing influences, even the friendship of schoolmate Ama, whom their parents have brought to Aster for the summer. On the social front, neighbor Saul Porter, the last Oklahoman settler and a reputed warlock, is pushing Samuel’s boundaries in more than the real estate sense. Ray and Eudora Frank, the Tynes’ first allies in Aster, have divided loyalties and ulterior motives. Although Edugyan’s spare prose, visceral images, and unfussy dialogue create a suitably ominous atmosphere, the plot advances haltingly and predictably. The family turmoil at the core of the story is more often summarized than shown, and the twins’ berserk behavior is too robotic to impart true horror to their intended role as engineers of the fall of the house of Tyne. Ama takes on an importance unjustified by her wan presence because the novel needs an Ishmael, and she’s it. The close, however, stark in its avoidance of redemptive bromides, is astonishingly moving.
A talented author to watch as her narrative technique matures.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-073603-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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