An ambitiously complicated broth of content with surprisingly little flavor.
Inseparable friends in a New Mexico barrio grow up to love the same woman and share a suicide pact.
Ethnicities, cultures, passions and beliefs clash portentously in Sumner’s second novel (The School of Beauty and Charm, 2001, etc.), which drags epic, tragic themes into its portrait of a mixed community in Taos. Mister Romero, grandson of Ignacia, the local curandera (healer/witch/herbalist) with Jicarilla Apache and Tiwa origins, is the blood brother of Latino Tomás Mondragón, son of an abusive, neglectful mother. At school, both fall under the spell of Anglo Raquel O’Brien from South Carolina, but it’s Tomás who first becomes her boyfriend. Tomás, however, has violence in him and the relationship doesn’t run smoothly, eventually allowing Mister Romero to have his chance with the girl he loved from first sight, although by then he will have blood on his hands. Sumner’s jumbled chronology and mixture of narrative perspectives further muddles an impressionistic, busily populated story. The conclusion, similarly diffuse, offers natural justice to one character and apparently easy redemption to another.
An ambitiously complicated broth of content with surprisingly little flavor.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-38270-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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