Review by Booklist Review
Kristien Muller prides herself on being a bad girl, well, headstrong. A rebellious expatriate Afrikaner, she has been living in London and trying to do her bit for the African National Congress. Now she returns to her small South African town after 11 years because her beloved grandmother (Ouma) is dying and wants outlaw Kristien to receive the family memory. It's a few weeks before the country's first democratic elections and Kristien's first-person narrative of the contemporary scene is woven together with Ouma's family saga, stretching back and back across generations: women's stories of oppression and rebellion, family secrets, myths, and legends. The fictional structure is contrived (even with magical realism, Ouma's eloquent voice is not that of a dying centenarian), and the feminism is strident and overexplained. But, as in A Dry White Season (1980), Brink fuses politics with family intimacy. Perhaps the most moving character is Kristien's sister, trapped in an abusive patriarchal marriage. American readers will be caught by the parallels with this country in a story of strong women on a frontier shaped by men. --Hazel Rochman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
South Africa as a new nation is barely two years old, and already it has a magnificent, world-class celebratory novel (though it could have done with a more meaningful title). Spirited, compassionate Kristien Muller, who long ago left her native country for Britain, returns to the bedside of her beloved grandmother Ouma. The very old lady, living alone in a fantastic mansion built in the veld by her eccentric ancestors, has been badly burned in a fire apparently set by some mischievous boys on the eve of the elections that will change South Africa. Kristien's sister Anna still lives in the neighborhood, unhappily married to Casper, the kind of conservative Boer who is convinced the country is going to hell. The clashes between Kristien, with her instinctive liberalism, and the glum, suspicious police types who surround Casper create an instant electricity that never flags. Much of the book is taken up with a series of hypnotically wonderful tales old Ouma spins from her sickbed about the incredible women in her family. The old woman's stories add up to a kind of national history illuminated by magic, as well as by a powerful feminine spirit that sees men, with their quarrels and rivalries, as obstacles to happiness, good only for breeding. That a male writer could have created so intensely female a visionand it is matched by hauntingly empathetic observation of young daughters and uneasy sistersseems almost miraculous. The book has two overwhelming climaxes, an election-day scene that joyfully catches the spirit of a nation turning itself around, and a multiple murder as grimly terrifying as anything in American crime fiction. And the ending, irradiated again by magic, is profoundly moving. Brink (An Act of Terror; States of Emergency) would be a household name here if writers had their just deserts. Author tour. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In the latest work from South African writer Brink (An Act of Terror, LJ 12/91), an expatriate Afrikaner returns home for a few history lessons from her dying grandmother. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Brink (On the Contrary, 1994, etc.) awkwardly mixes magic realism, feminist rhetoric, and political reportage as a South African family's blood-soaked past becomes a reprise of the country's own violent history. When sister Anna calls Kristien in London and tells her that their dying grandmother, Ouma, has stories that she must tell her, Kristien is not entirely surprised. In a dream the night before the call, Ouma had appeared to her on the back of a big bird. And there will be more birds--at the family farm and in the hospital where Ouma now is, badly burned after her farmhouse was set on fire. Kristien, who left South Africa because of apartheid, returns on the eve of the first multiracial elections to find the fearful country caught up in violence. Whites and Coloreds (people of mixed race) are especially fearful, and some whites, like Kristien's boorish brother-in-law Casper, have formed armed militias. Paralleling these developments are the fables Ouma tells Kristien. Like some antique Scheherezade, Ouma, more than a hundred years old, proceeds to spend the last days of her life entrusting Kristien with the family stories. And Brink, who has embraced feminism with admirable but uncritical enthusiasm, puts women at the center of these tales. They dominate, shape, and define the past, which too neatly includes a Khaikhoi woman captured by an Afrikaner farmer and then protected by the birds; a Boer Gargantua who hefts wagons, heals, and speaks out on women's rights; a lesbian and her lover; and Ouma herself, who ran off with a Jewish singer. When Ouma finally dies, Kristien's sister Anna, long-abused by Casper and fearful of the future, makes a tragic decision, but Kristien is empowered and ready to stay and help the new country. The past is only schematically reworked here, but the recent present is engagingly fresh and touching as Brink records the high emotions of the historic days of April 1994.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
