This story of race, family, and other “ties that bind” is a product of its environment – South Africa around the end of apartheid – as much as it is a story of universal human nature. Told from multiple perspectives, it represents the hard work of reconciliation in a culture divided by so many ephemeral things like ethnicity or skin color. It is also a story about real horrors also dividing us like sexual abuse,…
This story contains themes from many strands of life: race, grief, family, sexuality, LGBTQI+ issues, authenticity, estrangement, speaking lies or truth, and self-determination. None of these predominate in the narrative; rather, they seem to dwell together in just the right amount. Perhaps that’s why it’s won so much acclamation since being published a year ago. Bennett’s tale begins in a small town in Louisiana with an African-American family under Jim Crow. The father was lynched…
J.R.R. Tolkien is most well known as the author behind the famed series The Lord of the Rings. He was also an Oxford don (in the field of Anglo-Saxon literature) and a family man who was widely adored for his overactive imagination. He wrote little publicized letters to his children every year at Christmastime by posing as Father Christmas (the equivalent of Santa Claus), replete with this trademark imagination and with drawings and paintings. His…