A top-tier war novel, inventive and cleareyed about the consequences of violence.
A man is forced into the turmoil of Nigeria’s brutal Biafran war.
Adekunle Aromire—the protagonist of Booker Prize finalist Obioma’s third novel—has overheard his mother saying that he’s cursed. By her lights, his neglect caused a car accident that nearly killed his younger brother, Tunde, when the boys were 9 and 6. Years later, in 1967, Kunle is a recent college graduate who learns that his brother has moved with a woman to the new separatist state of Biafra; guilt-stricken and fearing for his brother’s safely, Kunle volunteers with a Red Cross group, one of the few ways for a Nigerian to safely enter the region. Unfortunately, Kunle is separated from the group, found by Biafran soldiers, and compelled to join its army. Biafra’s two-year war with Nigeria was a failed and notoriously brutal affair, killing hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians, and Obioma’s rendition of it is distinguished in part by his unflinching writing about the violence and how Kunle “has drunk his fill of the war’s raw water.” In short order, he and his fellow soldiers grow hardened and demoralized, skeptically considering the generals and mercenaries who deliver their marching orders. (One is Rolf Steiner, a real-life German soldier of fortune.) The horrors are tempered by an unlikely but well-sold battlefield romance and by Kunle’s commitment to fulfilling his original mission of finding Tunde. The story is also leavened by Obioma’s consideration of the role of fate in all this: Interstitial chapters feature a Seer who has prophesied the novel’s events. Obioma has captured the essential elements of the war novel—the near-death experience, the tragic losses, the flickering moments of generosity and grace—but he inhabits them with a rare command, empathy, and intensity of feeling.
A top-tier war novel, inventive and cleareyed about the consequences of violence.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9780593596975
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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