What starts as a page-turner becomes an overblown saga.
Bestselling author of Cane River (2001) brings another 19th-century family story, this one focused on the Colfax Massacre, the bloodiest battle of the Reconstruction era.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, the November 1872 elections are the first time the freed slaves living in the Bottom, an African-American settlement near Colfax, La., are able to assert their citizenship. But the election is inconclusive, and when the white Democratic ticket tries to unlawfully take office, the largely Republican black population occupies the town courthouse, waiting for support from the federal government. For Israel Smith and Sam Tademy, the choice is difficult—each has a wife and children in the Bottom to think about, and every day they spend in the courthouse is a harder one for their families. But as whites begin to learn about the occupation, the Bottom also becomes increasingly unsafe. Fighting begins in earnest in April, when a white army enters Colfax and brutally murders nearly every black man there. Sam is given the task of leading the women and children out of Colfax and is thus spared, and on his way back to town finds Israel, wounded but still alive. Nearly a decade after the riots, the author continues the story of the two families and their depleted community from the perspective of the next generation—particularly Israel’s son Noby and Sam’s son Jackson (Green, who shared his father’s dream of building a school for black children, is killed in a hunting accident). The families further intertwine when members of the third generation marry, and each tries to figure out how to—and if they even should—maintain the legacy of Colfax. The first half of the book sheds light on an overlooked event, and is rife with palpable tension, but the author tries to cram far too much history and family drama into the second half.
What starts as a page-turner becomes an overblown saga.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2007
ISBN: 0-446-57898-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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