Caribbean-born CondÇ (Segu, 1987; The Children of Segu, 1989; and see below) gives questionable life to Tituba, one of the accused and subsequently released witches of Salem, in a novel of some conflicting purpose. In a lengthy afterword that includes an interview with the author, CondÇ claims to be expressing her opinion about present-day America, where ``little has changed since the days of the Puritans''; to be writing a postmodern mock epic in which she parodies the heroic epic—and contemporary feminism; and to be giving Tituba ``a reality that was denied to her because of her color and her gender.'' But these authorial claims and results seem frequently at odds in this story of Tituba, born on the island of Barbados to a slave raped by a British seaman. When her mother is hung for striking a white man, the child is raised by a local soothsayer who teaches her to summon the dead and heal with herbs. She marries handsome but weak John Indian; and when the couple is sold to the Reverend Samuel Parris, they accompany the Parris family to Salem. There, Tituba practices her healing, tries to help young Betsy Parris, but instead, caught up in the witch-hunt, is accused of trying to harm her. In prison, she meets Hester Prynne, and to defray the cost of her keep is sold to a Jewish widower, a victim of local prejudice, who, grateful for her bringing back his beloved dead, arranges for Tituba to return to Barbados. Back in her old cabin, she is killed when her lover, trying to organize a slave revolt, is betrayed. But Tituba goes on: ``Now that I've gone over to the invisible world I continue to heal and cure. But primarily I have dedicated myself to hardening men's hearts to fight.'' The confusion of ends doesn't help a book that has too obviously sacrificed a moving and dramatic story to agenda and fashion. Tituba deserves better.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8139-1398-5
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Univ. of Virginia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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