A novel about race, education, and the fin de siècle fight for equal rights is left wanting.
In turn-of-the-20th-century New York, a woman passes as white to attain a college education.
Anita Hemmings, a real person, was the first black woman to graduate from Vassar College. To do so, she passed as white, and when her secret was discovered, her story filled newspapers across the United States. In her third novel, Tanabe (The List, 2013, etc.) sets out to illuminate that story. She focuses on Anita’s senior year of college, when her roommate was Lottie Taylor, in Tanabe’s telling a millionaire Manhattan socialite. Anita spent her first three years at Vassar flying under the radar: she studied hard, participated in various clubs, and held herself aloof to avoid suspicion. Tanabe’s descriptions of Anita’s isolation are effective. Then Lottie appears, drawing Anita out of herself and into her own high-society world. She even introduces Anita to the rich, handsome, and, of course, white Porter Hamilton, with whom Anita finds herself falling in love. These experiences put Anita at greater risk of being caught, but they also frame for her a fundamental choice she’ll have to make: to live as white, and to unbind the scope of her ambition, or to live as black, with all the restrictions that Gilded Age American life entailed. This is a detailed, well-researched book, and yet there’s something unconvincing about Tanabe’s depiction. It’s as if the psychological complexity of Anita’s situation has been somehow flattened. None of the characters—not even Anita or Lottie—ever come fully to life. Too much attention is paid to Vassar trivia and not enough to Anita’s fate, which is ultimately rushed through at the unsatisfying end. Tanabe has brought attention to a brilliant and fascinating woman, but she doesn’t seem to have done her justice.
A novel about race, education, and the fin de siècle fight for equal rights is left wanting.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1045-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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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