A fresh and exceptionally strong family portrait, mercifully free of the sentimentality that could easily have turned the...
A first novel about the fledgling branches of an Irish-American family tree.
Catharine McLaughlin isn’t your typical family saga matriarch—neither rich nor controlling, she does nevertheless possess the one indispensable mark of the grande dame: longevity. On the cusp of 80, Catharine is a widowed mother old enough to have seen many of her children’s children grow up—and now, with her granddaughter Gracie pregnant, to see another generation about to begin. Gracie is an unmarried advice columnist in her 20s who has just broken up with her boyfriend and has a love/hate relationship with her sister Lila, who used to share a house with her. Lila is a classic control freak, a brilliant medical student whose total lack of bedside manner may keep her from making it through residency. Lila, typically, thinks it’s selfish of Gracie to have the baby, though she’s secretly envious. She isn’t the only one: Gracie’s childless Aunt Angel offers to adopt the child, and Catharine herself feels a surge of hope when she learns that a new McLaughlin is one the way. Now in a nursing home, Catharine seems to have begun her final decline: She loses her driver’s license after a minor accident, then breaks her hip in a fall. She also sees and has conversations with dead relatives, but that isn’t a sign of dementia so much as a legacy from the wilds of Ireland, where both of her parents where born. Catharine has weathered enough of life’s hardships (stillborn twins, a dead daughter, a son still traumatized by Vietnam 30 years later) to take sorrow in stride, and her extended family rely upon her for much of their own stability. How will they manage without her? That’s a question only the next generation can answer.
A fresh and exceptionally strong family portrait, mercifully free of the sentimentality that could easily have turned the proceedings into a soap opera.Pub Date: June 29, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-5188-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
SEEN & HEARD
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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