Ahl writes with an intensity that never quite goes over the line into melodrama, although it comes close at times, and her...
Quirky but appealing debut about a young woman who returns to her childhood home in Africa to set some family ghosts to rest.
Anthropologist Elena Monroe is having some trouble finding herself. She grew up in Africa, where her stepfather researched polio and smallpox vaccines while her mother photographed elephants for conservation groups. Now she lives in New Mexico and tells everyone her mother died in 1975. But her boyfriend Michael, who lost his parents as a teenager and thinks they have that in common, one day meets Elena’s mother leaning on her car in Albuquerque. Why did Elena lie to him? Good question, especially after Elena packs up and leaves for Kenya the next day to visit her mother’s grave. In 1975, when Elena was only nine, East Africa was in the throes of an ivory craze, as skyrocketing prices combined with conservation laws to fuel a thriving black market in elephant tusks. Elena’s mother set out to document the poaching cartels that rampaged through the bush in search of big profits from illegal safaris, and she soon found herself in the middle of a mob war of sorts, in which the legal boundaries separating the mobsters from the militias from the cabinet ministers were all but erased. We know that the young Elena saw someone killed during an elephant shoot; we also know that someone is buried beneath her mother’s tombstone. It will take some doing to disentangle the rest of the facts from this intentionally snarled narrative, but that doesn’t dampen the fire here. Maybe after Elena sorts it all out she can come home and get on with her life—if she’s lucky.
Ahl writes with an intensity that never quite goes over the line into melodrama, although it comes close at times, and her evocation of Kenya is impressionistic and moving without being manipulative or touristy.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-56689-154-X
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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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