GORILLA, MY LOVE and Other Stories

by Toni Cade Bambara ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1972

This is a fine collection of short stories by a young black author, filled with that incredible health, cultural zing, and joyful irony of people whose bodies keep pace with their minds. The best are first-person accounts of childhood incidents, generally from the viewpoint of a clever, backtalking tomboy whose toughness only reveals the tenderness it is meant to conceal -- a jive-y surface far more refreshing than the white adolescent's existential sulk. Many of these stories are about betrayal, particularly of children by grown-ups, particularly when the conventions of discourse are at fault as in the moving title story in which the uncle (who in teasing fashion told his niece he was going to wait for her to grow up) marries someone else. The only flaw is a kind of inoffensive sentimentality -- both in the plots which tend toward easy moral points (perhaps inevitable with ""naive narrators""), and in the almost too readable language, in which sass substitutes for the difficult but rewarding rigors of a somewhat more inaccessible (and less compromising?) idiom.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1972

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1972

Categories: FICTION