Bingo Square Round 2: Underrepresented I expected that this novel would be good given faintingviolet’s review, but it completely surpassed those expectations. I was completely blown away by this novel, and how elegantly Gyasi plotted this family epic, showing how the slave trade shaped two different countries. I have read books and novels that addressed the experiences of men and women stolen from their homes who survived the Middle Passage and were forced into the United States slavery system. I’ve read about sharecropping, prison labor, the […]
No man here lives a charmed life.
Okay, I’m probably operating on far too little sleep to write a coherent review, but here goes. The prose here is a luminous dream, casting it’s shadows upon the mind and lulling the reader into a warm and tranquil languidity. Coming so fast on the heels of the tenaciously awkward writing of Stephanie Meyer, the fluidity exhibited by Conrad is both refreshing in its rarity and a disheartening reminder that I can never be the writer I often dream that I am. This story has […]
My, what big teeth you have.
The inimitable H.G. Wells, from 1895-98, wrote The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and War of the Worlds. That’s an unbelievable concentration of brilliance that I can’t find in another writer. Someone like Stephen King has written numerous works that will (or have already) become classics of their genre, but they’re spread out over a career (for instance, 1978’s The Stand followed hot on the heels of 1977’s The Shining, but Misery came out in 1987 and The Green Mile […]
The American Dream as an iridescent admonition.
The Pearl is a fairly simple tale, a parable, of the destruction wrought upon a family by colonialism, capitalism, and wealth. Kino is a hardworking, but impoverished, man who works as a pearl diver. When his infant son, Coyolito, is stung by a scorpion, Kino seeks help from the village doctor. They are turned away for lack of funds, and Kino and is wife, Juana, make the best of the situation with an herbal poultice. He returns to the ocean in the hopes that he’ll […]
Joseph Conrad Meets Graham Greene
The Strangler Vine was long listed for the 2014 Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction and the description — historical fiction set in early 19th-century India featuring a green soldier, a wizened political operative and Thuggees — made it sound too good to pass up. Images of Indiana Jones came to mind, but Carter offers her readers so much more than that pulpy comic-booky fare. Trained as a journalist, she delivers a meticulously researched political novel that reminded me of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and […]
A dark tale of colonialism and liberation in Africa
This is a remarkable book about religion, racism, sexism, feminism, colonialism, capitalism, socialism … and about an amazing family that came to Africa as missionaries and learned truths that had nothing to do with God and everything to do with humanity. The Price family arrives in the then-Belgian Congo of 1959, headed by Southern Baptist Reverend Nathan Price, a wife-abusing, child-abusing, fanatical tyrant and bitter disappointment of a man. He and his captive wife Orleana and his four daughters arrive unwanted in an impoverished Congolese village […]
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