Insightful about racial and family relationships and the power to forgive.
A young photographer deals with psychological wounds from her narcissistic mother and father.
As this novel begins in 2004, young Artie (short for Artimeza) is recovering in a swank facility following a mental breakdown after catching her husband and her mother, Serena, engaging in oral sex. As Artie speaks to her compassionate psychiatrist, Dr. Ligon, intermittent flashbacks (from several characters’ points of view) fill in past details, particularly the painful period in 1990 when Artie was 10 and her mother abandoned her. Readers slowly learn how Serena also faced a childhood marked by abandonment; how Artie’s father, Rico, contributed to the unhealthy family dynamic; and how Serena’s conviction that she’s worthless affects her life. “Like your mother, your father put his needs before yours,” Dr. Ligon explains. “That narcissistic behavior results in negative feelings. But you didn’t learn that you had a right to express those feelings.” Artie struggles to understand her past, acknowledge the truth of her pain, and to forgive, especially when she’s tempted to get revenge on her mother after leaving the hospital and being pursued by Serena’s younger lover. Through the course of this novel, both mother and daughter learn to understand themselves and each other better—often backed by the sound of the jazz music they both love. Johnson (Vibrant And Clear: How To Be Acne Free, Naturally!, 2012, etc.) writes with sensitivity and a good ear for dialogue. She is both musically and psychologically acute, showing a solid understanding of the subtlety and flamboyance of narcissism. Her view of forgiveness is multilayered, and her characters’ mostly mixed-race status adds an interesting dimension to their experiences, e.g., in several backgrounds, a history of “passing for white.” Serena, so beautiful and talented, is defensive about her skin color: “She wanted…to show them that though she may not have been able to pass, she was beautiful nonetheless.” For Serena, that “nonetheless” means dark skin is something to overcome, not something to appreciate.
Insightful about racial and family relationships and the power to forgive.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1940503028
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Nortia Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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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