A riveting, well-judged blend of scientific discovery, mysticism, and personal development.
A young woman with a passionate scientific interest in frog toxins travels to the Amazon jungle and becomes a shaman’s apprentice in this debut novel.
Seventeen-year-old Francine Olivière Gagner of Portage, Michigan, never fit in with most kids, partly because she has hyperesthesia syndrome (she hates being touched, for example) and borderline Asperger’s. She does have a best friend in Melonee Hall; they have different interests, but both are of First Nations heritage. Walking late one night to Fran’s house, Melonee is attacked by Robert Rousch, a knife-wielding man who rants: “I hate you savages. You all need to be scalped.” Though he’s eventually convicted, he serves only a few years before being released. In the meantime, the two friends study martial arts for self-defense, graduate from high school, and share rooms while attending separate colleges. Fran receives a grant to study abroad in French Guiana, where she hopes to learn about poison-dart frogs and their biochemistry. She gets the chance to serve as an apprentice to a village shaman deep in the jungle, a difficult but enlightening process. Returning to the United States with valuable specimens, she—and her toxic frog—has a final confrontation with Rousch. In the first half of his book, Roach tells an engaging but meandering and episodic tale. The story really takes off in the second half with Fran’s intriguing trip to French Guiana. The tests she faces are considerable both mentally and physically, from adopting an unfamiliar tribal language and culture (such as being expected to stay put in a tiny hut during her period) to the shaman’s grueling teaching. Fran is always a scientist first, making her observations of shamanistic practices especially valuable. A satisfying ending ties all of the tale’s strands together nicely.
A riveting, well-judged blend of scientific discovery, mysticism, and personal development.Pub Date: July 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5320-8723-3
Page Count: 316
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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