From Dubus (Selected Stories, 1988), fourteen new pieces that show this stalwart author, more often than not, at his great- hearted best. Dubus can be both derivative and wildly uneven, as in his clone-of-Hemingway opener, about a boy and an accidental shooting (``The Intruder''), or in the mawkish melodrama of ``Falling in Love,'' the first of four touching on the life of wounded Vietnam veteran and lawyer Ted Briggs. At the same time, it's as if there is a stream of the natural, pure, and unaffected, and when Dubus's energies are tapping that current, it seems there's no human life he can't transform into quiet, passionate, commanding fiction. Even in short, one-take sketches about the losses felt by a divorced mother (``A Love Song'') or the death, in bed, of a 77-year-old woman's husband (``At Night''), Dubus puts his fingers on the pulse of lives made genuine, felt, and real. A high-danger story about a sunken boat and sharks (``Blessings'') make the heart leap into the throat; but other stories are touched over and again by sensitive, acute observations that stir the heart more quietly, as when a mother woke her kids up ``gently because she felt she was pulling them from childhood.'' Dubus's range is not so wide as it is deliberate and true: A retired Marine learns the despair and shame of being wounded (``The Colonel's Wife''); a 55-year-old man falls in love—or in despair—with a woman younger than his own daughter (``The Lover''); a woman, thinking of her children and husband, furiously beats down two attackers (``Out of the Snow''); and this same woman, before her marriage, learns through her Catholicism that her life, passion, and love are all one (``All the Time in the World''). At one point, in passing, literature is referred to as ``the human attempt to make truth palpable and delightful.'' And so, in Dubus's capable hands, it is.
Pub Date: Feb. 22, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-43107-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Refreshingly filled with love rather than sex, this coming-of-age novel examines the human cost of political repression.
A star-crossed romance captures the turmoil of pre-revolutionary Iran in Seraji’s debut.
From the rooftops of Tehran in 1973, life looks pretty good to 17-year-old Pasha Shahed and his friend Ahmed. They’re bright, funny and good-looking; they’re going to graduate from high school in a year; and they’re in love with a couple of the neighborhood girls. But all is not idyllic. At first the girls scarcely know the boys are alive, and one of them, Zari, is engaged to Doctor—not actually a doctor but an exceptionally gifted and politically committed young Iranian. In this neighborhood, the Shah is a subject of contempt rather than veneration, and residents fear SAVAK, the state’s secret police force, which operates without any restraint. Pasha, the novel’s narrator and prime dreamer, focuses on two key periods in his life: the summer and fall of 1973, when his life is going rather well, and the winter of 1974, when he’s incarcerated in a grim psychiatric hospital. Among the traumatic events he relates are the sudden arrest, imprisonment and presumed execution of Doctor. Pasha feels terrible because he fears he might have inadvertently been responsible for SAVAK having located Doctor’s hiding place; he also feels guilty because he’s always been in love with Zari. She makes a dramatic political statement, setting herself on fire and sending Pasha into emotional turmoil. He is both devastated and further worried when the irrepressible Ahmed also seems to come under suspicion for political activity. Pasha turns bitterly against religion, raising the question of God’s existence in a world in which the bad guys seem so obviously in the ascendant. Yet the badly scarred Zari assures him, “Things will change—they always do.”
Refreshingly filled with love rather than sex, this coming-of-age novel examines the human cost of political repression.Pub Date: May 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-451-22681-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
Lunge-Larsen and Preus debut with this story of a flower that blooms for the first time to commemorate the uncommon courage of a girl who saves her people from illness. The girl, an Ojibwe of the northern woodlands, knows she must journey to the next village to get the healing herb, mash-ki- ki, for her people, who have all fallen ill. After lining her moccasins with rabbit fur, she braves a raging snowstorm and crosses a dark frozen lake to reach the village. Then, rather than wait for morning, she sets out for home while the villagers sleep. When she loses her moccasins in the deep snow, her bare feet are cut by icy shards, and bleed with every step until she reaches her home. The next spring beautiful lady slippers bloom from the place where her moccasins were lost, and from every spot her injured feet touched. Drawing on Ojibwe sources, the authors of this fluid retelling have peppered the tale with native words and have used traditional elements, e.g., giving voice to the forces of nature. The accompanying watercolors, with flowing lines, jewel tones, and decorative motifs, give stately credence to the story’s iconic aspects. (Picture book/folklore. 4-8)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-395-90512-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
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