A flawed but valuable fictional reckoning with a failed revolution.
A reimagining of Egypt’s 2011 Tahrir Square protests and the hypocrisies underlying the state’s response.
Al Aswany, Egypt’s best-known living novelist, loves cross sections of his home country: Chicago (2008) and The Automobile Club of Egypt (2015) both feature sizable casts of characters who symbolize elements of Egyptian society. His strategy is the same in this ambitious and hard-hitting, if sometimes stiff, novel. As protests of Hosni Mubarak’s decadeslong dictatorial regime intensify, multiple characters support or resist the revolution. Danya, a protester and medical student, openly defies her father, a prominent general, Ahmad. Ashraf, a hash-smoking failed actor conducting an affair with his maid, is stoked out of his passivity by the nearby crowds. Asmaa, a teacher at a corrupt school, falls for Mazen, a labor organizer at a cement factory. Nourhan, the wife of the factory’s manager, becomes a prominent TV host, spouting falsehoods that the protesters are paid-off agents of the United States and Israel. Al Aswany means to skewer the hypocrisy that infuses much of the national psyche, how Islamic prohibitions are casually sidestepped to rationalize everything from infidelity to state-sanctioned rape and murder. (As one character puts it: "We're in Egypt. Injustice is the rule.") Because Al Aswany is trying to deliver a political portrait as much as a social novel, many of the characters hew to simplistic archetypes: Mazen is a clenched-fist pro-revolution sloganeer, Ahmad a coldblooded torturer. But the characters the author clearly has more affection for, like Ashraf and Asmaa, are richer and more flawed, and their experiences reveal how their acts of protest have social and personal consequences. And as a whole, the novel shows how the early promise of the protests fizzled, leading the country to lapse back into authoritarianism. Any successful revolution, Al Aswany suggests, will demand a wholesale cultural reckoning and tolerance for violent push back.
A flawed but valuable fictional reckoning with a failed revolution.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-307-95722-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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