Informative and direct storytelling from a corner of Africa that’s poorly understood in the West.
Snapshots of rural and urban life in Somalia, written by a refugee and concerned with the “morality that’s long been dead” there.
In the late 1980s, Yusuf fled his native country for America, where he learned English and began writing nonfiction, plays, and short stories. This debut collection has some flat plotting and clunky lines, but Yusuf is unquestionably talented, with a knack for stories focused on injustice and the anxiety of separation, be it over time or distance. In the fablelike closing story, a young man who’s separated from his fellow refugees in the midst of Somalia’s civil war is given unlikely safe harbor by a lion, with the implication that the dangerous animal has a more honorable moral system than the human leaders who’ve splintered the country. Yusuf delivers a similar point in a more realistic form in “A Delicate Hope,” about an aspiring writer who’s given an opportunity to move to Saudi Arabia and escape his country’s degradations (rampant violence, innocent youth pressed into military service) only to watch his hopes get dashed catastrophically. Five linked stories featuring a woman named Mayxaano focus on Somali life more removed from military strife: She grew up an outcast (“Midgaan”) before becoming a teacher eager to speak up against the country’s caste system and misogynist culture. (“Men had claimed exclusive ownership of Somali poetry, although throughout history women had played a pivotal role by actually composing it,” Yusuf writes.) Each story individually has an instructive tone, but taken together the cycle has a more complex perspective on how people are inspired or damaged by social forces. Lives are lost to “an accumulation of social illnesses,” Mayxaano says, and these plainspoken stories are laments for their consequences.
Informative and direct storytelling from a corner of Africa that’s poorly understood in the West.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-946395-07-8
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Catalyst Press
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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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