A moving, deeply felt and lyrical novel about past and present.
A 23-year-old refugee from Liberia tries to escape the horrors of her past on the island of Santorini.
Jacqueline arrives in Santorini with a backpack, the clothes on her back and no money. We slowly learn the details of her life through a series of flashbacks to her home and affair with a French journalist as well as through imagined conversations with her mother, a religious woman who believes in equal measure in two contradictory ideas: that everything is “God’s will” and that “We pay for our sins, for the sins of others....Anyway, we can’t understand.” At first, Jacqueline finds a cave in which to spend her nights, and she supports herself by giving foot massages to the tourists on the beaches. This helps her make a subsistence living, though much of the time she’s still uncomfortably close to starvation. She develops a routine in her living, catching showers surreptitiously and then eventually sleeping in an abandoned hotel. She also befriends Katarina, a waitress at a local cafe, who provides her food and friendship, for both women are lonely and in need of companionship. Through memory and conversation, Jacqueline’s story finally comes out. While her mother had always looked for meaning through religious consolation, her father, Liberia’s finance minister and a believer in the government of Charles Taylor, was simultaneously more political and more cynical. Jacqueline also has strong memories of her pregnant younger sister, Saifa. At the end of the novel, Jacqueline feels comfortable enough with Katarina to open up about the terrifying circumstances that led to her leaving Liberia.
A moving, deeply felt and lyrical novel about past and present.Pub Date: July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-96257-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
PROFILES
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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