From the raptures of Appalachian Spring to the many, complicated facets of women’s lives in that time and place: a superb...
Breathtaking both for its beauty and its pain, House’s second (after Clay’s Quilt, 2001) tells a finely nuanced tale of a Kentucky mountain family in the tumultuous WWI era, as the taking of a Cherokee bride unleashes passions that create life and destroy it.
Vine seems a vision to young Saul when he first sees her as he and his brother Aaron ride by her house on horseback, but she quickly proves real, giving emergency treatment when Aaron is bitten by a copperhead. The feelings between Saul and Vine being mutual, their courtship is brief despite her mother’s misgivings, and she moves from all-Cherokee Redbud Camp to all-white God’s Creek, where Saul and Aaron live with their mother Esme. For a time all is well: the couple build their own house, Vine gives birth to daughter Birdie and becomes a beloved daughter to Esme. But work pressures increase for Saul, a logging foreman, as the clouds of war gather, and he must go away to distant mountains from which he can rarely get time off to travel home. In his absence, Aaron moves from brazenly staring at Vine to making an unwelcome advance. Rebuffed, he disappears, much to his doting mother’s dismay. When he returns a few months later with a pregnant bride of his own, however, Esme is not much relieved, as Aaron beats his wife, drinks, disappears for days at a time, and still lusts after Vine. His attempt to rape her in front of Birdie is the point of no return: Vine kills him in self-defense but keeps it a secret, watching in agony as Aaron’s “disappearance” eats away at Esme and at Aaron’s wife. Finally, she’ll see her secret come between her and Saul when the war ends and he returns home for good.
From the raptures of Appalachian Spring to the many, complicated facets of women’s lives in that time and place: a superb combination of wonder and suffering.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-367-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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