An empathetic, challenging examination of familial secrets, shame, and solidarity.
In Rosenberg’s (This Is Not Civilization, 2004) second novel, a man attempts to “resolve the puzzle” of his relationship with his late, estranged brother.
To the rest of the world, Yusuf Elmas was the hard-partying, womanizing CEO of the cellphone company Teletürk. But to Avram Benezra, Yusuf was his younger brother who rejected the family name and made billions while Avram led an unflashy life as an architect, husband, and father. In the spring of 2005, 14 years after they last spoke, Avram receives a call from Yusuf in the middle of the night and promptly hangs up on him. The following day, he finds out that his brother, a strong swimmer, drowned in the Sea of Marmara after a high-speed boating accident. Five years later, Avram learns that Yusuf had bequeathed his decrepit mansion on the Princes’ Islands to their dead father. Although Avram’s marriage is troubled, he travels alone to the islands to renovate the mansion with the help of Yusuf’s servants, including cook Flora Demirkan, whose 19-year-old daughter, Yasemin Demopoulous, drowned alongside his brother. As Avram speaks with Yusuf’s friends and acquaintances, he reconciles his memory of his difficult sibling—who accused their father of thievery, among other crimes—with an image of a kindhearted, ethical man who risked his life to publicly acknowledge the Armenian genocide in his native Turkey. Avram begins to suspect that his brother’s political actions are connected to his suspicious death, and author Rosenberg hints at a suspenseful conspiracy narrative to which he never quite commits. Despite this missed opportunity, the novel remains compelling and moving thanks to the sibling relationship at its core, which raises provocative questions about loyalty, jealousy, and how well one person can know another. A longing for intimacy shines through Rosenberg’s loveliest passages, as when 9-year-old Avram treats his 5-year-old brother’s cystic fibrosis and comes to “know, better than my own, the geometry of moles and birthmarks on [Yusuf’s] neck.”
An empathetic, challenging examination of familial secrets, shame, and solidarity.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-942515-18-0
Page Count: 494
Publisher: Fomite
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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