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
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
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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