A messy work that will not enhance Younes’s reputation.
Set in 1930s Lebanon, this short formless offering from the Lebanese author of B as in Beirut (2007) is a diffuse mood piece until it lurches into a helter-skelter chronicle of domestic upheaval.
Sarah is a lonely, unhappy adolescent, the only child of her father’s second marriage. She lives in a large house in a Lebanese village with her father, her half-brother and her aunt; the two men loathe each other. She pines for her mother, who vanished when she was very young; her life is defined by her absence. Her wealthy landowning father, over 60, is cold and distant, tending to his silkworm business; her aunt Shams is a scold; only her half-brother hugs and kisses her. Sarah spends much of her time daydreaming in a walnut tree until she breaks her leg and is bedridden for two months. The silkworm business occupies the foreground, as her father bullies the migrant workers and deceives his foreman with empty promises. Rumors and tensions abound. Did Sarah’s father swindle his father-in-law out of his lands? Was that why her mother left him? Christian missionaries come calling, offending Shams, a strict Druze. Sarah’s teacher, an Englishwoman, is sending love-letters to her brother. Suddenly, without foreshadowing, Sarah is a young woman in love, exchanging passionate kisses with her brother’s friend Karim, who works for a British oil company. Skipping the courtship, Younes marries them off and sends them on a business trip to England. Sarah tracks down a friend of her mother’s, but her memory’s gone. Back in Lebanon she gives birth to a daughter; the birth comes on the heels of her father’s death. All that emerges with clarity from this crush of events is Sarah’s realization that her quest for her mother has been a waste of time and that a change of scene solves nothing.
A messy work that will not enhance Younes’s reputation.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56656-700-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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