An effective novel designed to introduce young readers to a new culture.
Berliner’s novel introduces older children to the culture and problems of modern Zimbabwe but leaves them with hope for the future.
Luka, an almost–13-year-old boy from a Zimbabwean village, is looking forward to his manhood ceremony and the next opportunity to visit his cousin, whose village includes both a school and a clinic. But from the book’s early pages, the government’s opposition to such American-funded amenities demonstrates the threat the villagers face from President Robert Mugabe’s soldiers. Almost as soon as the reader has had a chance to absorb the details of life in rural Zimbabwe—Luka’s daily walk to fetch water, the constant threat of drought, terms like “bakkie” and “sadza”—the soldiers arrive, killing Luka’s parents and wounding him in the leg. With the help of a Doctors Without Borders team, the boy is airlifted to a South African hospital, where he spends several weeks healing both physically and emotionally. He recovers with the help of hospital volunteer Sarah, who brings Luka home to live with her and her father. Luka and Sarah share a love of dance, and the book’s title is drawn from their discussion of Swan Lake. (Sarah is also the most prominent of the book’s several Jewish characters, another opportunity for cultural understanding.) It might be argued that the book presents an idealized view of Zimbabwe’s current crisis, as Luka ends up reunited with his surviving family member and living comfortably in South Africa instead of joining the thousands of refugees. But the book is aimed at young adults, and it does a respectable job of capturing some of the horrors of the Mugabe regime without overwhelming its young audience. The book has minor spelling and grammar errors, but the overall story is strong.
An effective novel designed to introduce young readers to a new culture.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-1479124237
Page Count: 136
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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