Memories are shared and friendships strengthened in a story that suffers from trying to be a history of both Kenya and the...
In her second novel to be published in the Women Writing Africa series (see above), Kenyan writer Macgoye spins an intermittently moving, if often didactic, tale.
Here, seven elderly women recall their lives during a period of great change. All seven, members of different tribes and faiths, live in the Refuge, a church-run shelter for the impoverished old and ailing. Like a chorus, their individual voices join to carry a common refrain—a plaint about their present condition—and then separate to resume their own stories, which in turn are interrupted by the others. All have had hard lives, and all have been affected by such political events in Kenya as the Mau Mau revolt against the British, independence, and the short-lived revolution of the 1960s. Bessie lives in the past now as she mourns her only son, a deserter who was seized by soldiers during the military revolt and shot dead in front of her. Light-skinned Mama Chungu recalls how she became the servant, then the mistress, of a white man. Nekesa, a former prostitute, relates how she lost the only surviving member of her family, a brother who had been a soldier in WWII but afterward turned to drink. The ailing Rahel is a soldier’s widow; Priscilla once worked for a white woman whose family was killed by the Mau Mau in Priscilla’s presence; and Sophia, a Moslem, accidentally caused a fire that killed members of her own family. The most interesting and vivid personality is Wairimu, who was determined to make her own way after she was seduced: she left home, worked at various jobs, and became involved in politics as she organized her fellow workers and protested continuing British rule.
Memories are shared and friendships strengthened in a story that suffers from trying to be a history of both Kenya and the old women.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-55861-254-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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