A charming, readable tale about a resilient woman’s search for her family—both regular and supernatural.
A Midwesterner recalls her semienchanted childhood.
This latest novel from Koerber (I Once Was Lost but Now I’m Found, 2017) tells the complicated family history of a 65-year-old woman named Andy. She lives in sleepy Allenburg, Iowa, “a small market town in the Midwest, surrounded by puppy mills, factory farms, and meth labs. And cornfields. Lots of gravel roads and lots of cornfields.” Andy looks back on her life growing up in this quiet, peaceful backwater, living with her brother, Danny, and her caustic, bitter mother, Cindy (her father, scorned by Cindy, left long ago). Andy and her mother enjoy chain-smoking and trading barbs. When she’s 13, Andy meets her “fairy godmother,” Alana, and, intriguingly, the label in the girl’s reminiscences seems as much literal as figurative. Alana introduces Andy to the world of Algonquin folklore, which she eagerly absorbs: “She wanted to understand the words of the oldest jiibay, or fairies, from back before they learned Native words and long before they started speaking English.” Andy’s memories move forward in time to encompass her mother’s failing health and her own relationship with her daughter, Bridget. Koerber balances her narrative’s relaxed and direct pacing with frequent, evocative descriptions of the seasonal beauty of the Midwest, which Andy always remembers warmly: “The grass in the yard was silvery, the trees a strange dense black flecked with the starlight that reflected off the leaves. She felt the night air wrap itself around her, heavy as a wool blanket.” The tale progresses naturally through Andy’s memories as she recalls encountering more clues as to the nature and whereabouts of her missing father. The author smoothly works in light fantasy elements, touching on the fairy kingdom that’s always adjacent to the real world. “Aunty” Alana tells Andy stories about that jiibay realm and its ways. The resulting gentle mix of small-town life and glamorous fairies is ultimately enchanting.
A charming, readable tale about a resilient woman’s search for her family—both regular and supernatural.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-946044-40-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Who Chains You Books
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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