Historian Hambly has toned down her Grand Guignol propensities and her over-the-top syntax but kept up her wily plotting and...
When Jean Lafitte gave up pirating and settled down in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish, rumors had him burying many of his purloined treasures there. But where exactly? The pursuit of the treasure foments a slave uprising deviously undermined by an evil saloonkeeper; leads the brothers Bertrand and Guifford Avocet to cheat each other, keep slave mistresses, sell off the slaves they were paying to spy on one another, and plot fratricide; and makes Abishag Shaw of the City Guards desperate for more help to keep the peace. Overloaded by his attempts to sort through the Avocet slaying, Shaw turns to his friend, freeman of color Benjamin January. But January (Die Upon a Kiss, 2001, etc.) barely has time to help him, since he’s determined to find out who killed luckless prostitute Hesione Legros, once the pampered mistress of one of Lafitte’s underlings. While January’s sister Dominique, pregnant by her about-to-be-married white lover, and his true love Rose, now jobless since her charge Artois was murdered, egg him on—and withstand a hurricane, a plantation fire, and enemies taking fire—January comes to understand what is truth and what are lies in the Lafitte legend, and the demands friendship makes whatever one’s color.
Historian Hambly has toned down her Grand Guignol propensities and her over-the-top syntax but kept up her wily plotting and 19th-century accuracy. Along with the faithful, readers new to the series will find this installment as bracing as chicory-laced coffee.Pub Date: July 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-553-10935-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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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