An ambitious work sabotaged by a confusing plot and awkwardly turbid prose.
In this historical novel set in the South Sudan, a man looks for the young sister he lost during the confusion of the country’s civil war, assisted by a battery of pilots and humanitarian workers.
While her village was being brutally pillaged by soldiers, 3-year-old Nyasala was separated from her family. Fortunately spared from violence, she’s been taken under the care of neighbor Mayen, who does his best to navigate her to safety across lands torn asunder by conflict. He’s a remarkably reliable guide for his age—he’s 18—unsurprising, since he’s worked as a spy for the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. Much later, Nyasala—now 10 years old—has been adopted by a Murle family; she’s of Nuer extraction, and the Nuers and Murles have long been locked in conflict over cattle, the “most profitable commodity.” Nyasala’s brother, Akol—who was separated from her when soldiers overran their village—learns that she may be living in Pibor, an area so dangerous its humanitarian staff is being evacuated. Debut author Jackson describes a collaborative effort to find her, detailing the roles of medical professionals, pilots, security officials, and nongovernmental organization operatives, as well as the enmeshed presence of “Mama UN.” It is impossible to identify, beyond Nyasala, a protagonist, a refreshingly uncommon literary strategy: First published in Spanish and translated by Katz, the entire novel reveals layer upon layer of bureaucratic entanglement and collegial cooperation among the many agencies, public and private, attempting to save the war-torn country from itself. However, the plot is crammed with too many intersecting narrative lines, and because of the general sloppiness of the writing—or perhaps of the translation—it is nearly impossible to keep them neatly distinct. The author seems to introduce a new character with each page, failing to give enough attention to any one of them to achieve proper development. Jackson is at his best portraying the grim litany of “persecution, rape, and street violence” in South Sudan’s capital city of Juba. However, his prose ranges from haltingly ungrammatical to simply unintelligible, as in sentences like this one: “It was their pride to maintain and controlling the area since their salary’s rarely paid which was another reason to erupt the current conflict in this young nation.”
An ambitious work sabotaged by a confusing plot and awkwardly turbid prose.Pub Date: June 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5320-7654-1
Page Count: 198
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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