Masterful and varied.
A gorgeously eerie collection that exposes elements of strange unreality lurking within the ordinary.
The lives of those near the fringes of society take center stage as Harun (A Man Came out of a Door in the Mountain, 2014) slowly untangles the secrets that lie within them. From hospital rooms to remote islands full of oddball residents, the settings are at once recognizable and inverted by a sense of foreboding that metastasizes and shifts. In "The Farmhouse Wife," a cash-strapped couple gratefully takes up residence in an abandoned home offered to them for low rent by an eccentric farmer, but a dissonant presence in their midst soon makes itself known, progressively eroding the couple’s sense of security in the house and relationship. The heartbreaking "Madame Ida" depicts an isolated elderly woman who receives anonymous sketches of her emotionally distant son in the mail; while "The New Arrival," which tracks an immigrant traveling illegally to the United States to bestow a potentially lifesaving gift on his cousin’s family, hums with precariousness and promise. And the collection’s title story, which features a 13-year-old girl reeling from her father’s death—and her mother’s agonized fixation on the idea that he might, against the odds, be alive on a remote island of his boyhood—offers a creeping meditation on loss, greed, and vengeance. Only the more metaphysical, slightly overworked "Temptation of the Tutelary," which features sort-of guardian angels whose charges have aged, strikes a dissonant note, though it doesn’t detract from the collection’s overall impact. Animated by a fierce sense of longing, Harun’s pieces expertly depict how individuals grapple with lost love, death, and uncertain futures. Each story exists within a carefully realized world—lit with detail like brilliant, bizarre snow globes—and, fueled by haunting prose, will remain gleaming in readers’ minds.
Masterful and varied.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4214-2669-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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