Despite hauntingly beautiful prose, there is a secondhand feel to Esther’s story, which plays fiddle to Jane’s navel-gazing.
Minot (Rapture, 2002, etc.) tries to combine a fictionalized but mostly journalistic account of the abduction of Ugandan children by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army with a sexual drama about the doomed romance of an American writer and a much younger white Kenyan.
The title refers to the actual girls taken from St. Mary’s Catholic boarding school in northern Uganda in 1996 by Kony’s rebels. The early scenes following the seizure of the young girls are riveting, the attempt of the school’s Italian nun to retrieve them—she wins the release of more than 100 girls while Kony’s men keep the strongest and most attractive for themselves—heartbreaking. The child-army experience is narrated through the eyes of Esther, who, like many of the St. Mary’s girls, eventually manages to escape to a rehab center. Esther’s narrative of her captivity and attempt to recover is intercut with the story of an American writer named Jane who has come to Africa to write about the St. Mary girls. Before traveling to Uganda, Jane stays in Nairobi, where she falls in with a group of expats and white Kenyans who read like Ernest Hemingway retreads: sexual free spirit Lana, her stuffy rich American lover, Don, sexy world-weary photographer Pierre. In her late 30s, Jane finds herself falling in love with Kenyan paraglider Harry, who is maybe 23. The group accompanies Jane to Uganda as a kind of a lark, but the mood sours as the privileged whites face the enormity of the atrocities committed against the kidnapped children, who were turned into murderers and sex slaves and are now struggling to readjust. Eventually, Jane interviews Esther, who tells her story, but even while Jane claims to be deeply moved by Esther’s tragedy, she is obsessing about Harry’s waning interest in their affair. Ultimately, Jane’s drama reaches its own tragic conclusion, proving perhaps that bad stuff can happen anywhere.
Despite hauntingly beautiful prose, there is a secondhand feel to Esther’s story, which plays fiddle to Jane’s navel-gazing.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-26638-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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
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"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
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