Ambitious, and usually on the mark: a novel that demands the reader’s participation, and that repays it well.
A richly detailed historical novel, set in a nation drifting toward civil war, that picks up where Kingman’s Not Yet Drown’d (2007) leaves off.
Grace Pollocke is a woman of parts: An artist of much accomplishment, raised in Europe and the Indies, she serves on the home front in Philadelphia while her seafaring husband wrests their fortune from the ports of Asia. Out there on the main, a young African American woman has been making her mark as well, and she returns to the New World with the promise that the silkworms in her hold can bring new wealth to a homegrown industry growing ever more reliant on slave-picked cotton. And there’s a rub, for Anibaddh Lyngdoh, it turns out, has released herself from slavery on her own recognizance—“taking of her freedom,” as one character says, “all those years ago in Scotland”—and now she’s caught up in the intricacies of the law concerning runaway slaves, since no good deed goes unpunished. Enter Grace, whose family history is bound up in Anibaddh’s in ways of which she is only dimly aware, and who turns up a few secrets as she learns more about those crossed destinies. Kingman works in the big ideas of slavery and complicity in it, skillfully depicting, for instance, the self-deceptions that afford one good Christian gentleman in Virginia biblical approval of the curious institution of human enslavement. Kingman channels the conventions of period prose into her own, so that her novel proceeds at the very leisurely, pre-television, pre-automobile pace of 19th-century storytelling. Her prose, too, is perhaps more stately than is the contemporary norm, as when she writes of Grace, “She preferred to blow out the candle when they made love, not from bashfulness, but to retire her eyes, just temporarily; to retire the greedy domineering eyes which swamped all the senses otherwise.” The reader unused to such slow and careful language may be impatient at turns, but, as Frederick Busch does in The Night Inspector, set in about the same time, Kingman handles it well and without anachronism.
Ambitious, and usually on the mark: a novel that demands the reader’s participation, and that repays it well.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-06547-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
