A beguiling contemporary tale with a supernatural subtext features a family confronting, and then accepting, all those universal heartaches—a child's death, a parent's decline—that can visit even the most functional. Grunwald (The Theory of Everything, 1991, etc.) uses New Year's Eve celebrations past and present to frame the story, set in New York, about Erica and her twin sister Heather. The two were once part of a close-knit family that celebrated each New Year's at home. But as the twins grew older, they drifted apart: Heather became a doctor like their father, married and had a son. Erica, a college professor, felt increasingly rejected. Dad had his problems, too: He never got over their mother's death, and, once retired, resented growing old. Erica marries a colleague, and when she falls pregnant at the same time as Heather, the two begin to recapture their old closeness. Erica has a daughter, Sarah, and Heather another son, David, and while the mothers push strollers and hang out together, the two new cousins develop their own closeness. By the time they are three, the children are inseparable. Then David is killed in a freak accident, and Sarah begins to behave in ways that threaten to destroy the sisters' relationship. Before Erica can even tell her that David is dead, Sarah announces that she has seen him and that he told her he was going away. These conversations with David, in a minutely described heaven, make Sarah a problem in school and encourage the grieving Heather, eager to learn what David is saying, to monopolize her. The ghostly David is eerily prescient. As the sisters fight for Sarah's love, their father shows signs of failing. A dramatic catharsis finally lays the family grief to rest and forges new bonds. A haunting rites-of-passage novel that, despite the required suspension of disbelief, is both profound and life-affirming. (First serial to Good Housekeeping; Literary Guild alternate selection)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-517-70491-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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