An authentic celebration of Tuareg culture.
Based the author’s experience living among Nigerien nomads in Tchin-Tabaraden, this fictional account follows 18-year-old Lark as she teaches English in one of Africa’s most remote deserts.
Expertly weaving history with an identity narrative, this novel delivers a first-hand account of life with the Tuaregs. Lark Stevens is born and raised at the Gaia Commune in California. In 1989, her 18th year, she endures heartbreak: When her medically fragile, beloved best friend, Gita, and her boyfriend, Roy, have an affair, Lark pleads for immediate acceptance to the Peace Corps. Once accepted, Lark ventures off to Africa, adopting the poet W.H. Auden’s idea that “you couldn’t be healed until you went to the desert.” Lark learns to teach English and ventures to Tchin-Tabaraden, a primitive village in the Sahel in Niger, the sandy space where the nomadic Tuaregs reside. While there, Lark endures illness, an unanticipated pregnancy, dehydration, and loss of a friend back home. She must integrate who she once was and who she becomes into her identity. The narrative stakes include survival for the Tuaregs and Lark herself as she learns to live in the desert and fight for a tribe in which she believes. Expertly weaving actual history and Lark’s identity narrative, the author uses sensory details, cultural and religious traditions, and a savvy narrative structure to both construct a young woman’s story and document a cultural perspective. The text also illustrates the natural trajectories of relationships and the emotional longing inherent in a character of Lark’s age. Within the multiple stories, Barron embeds themes beyond the dramatic conflicts of person verses self, other, and nature, exploring what can happen to societies with governments that neglect to value native people as they are. Although the ending feels abrupt and a bit underdeveloped, this is a remarkable novel, integrating aspects of cultural identity into multiple narratives.
An authentic celebration of Tuareg culture.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2022
ISBN: 979-8985008098
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Sea Crow Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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