A light, precisely observed novel.
A YA author’s nicely written adult debut novel blends historical richness and a fine sense of place to tell the story of a woman’s developing love for her husband—and for his Colorado farmland—over the course of six months in 1944.
In wartime Denver, Olivia Dunne becomes pregnant after a one-night stand with a departing American soldier. With the help of a local church, her father arranges her marriage to Ray Singleton, a beet farmer in faraway La Junta. Olivia’s first days on the isolated farm are awkward, and Ray, a shy, reticent man of good intentions, isn’t very adept at small talk. Precluded from contributing anything useful to the running of the farm, whose harvests are cultivated in part by labor from the local internment camp, Olivia takes long solitary walks. During one of them she meets Rose and Lorelei Umahara, Japanese-Americans from California who have been evacuated to confinement in Colorado. Young, enthusiastic, and passionate about butterfly hunting, the sisters introduce Olivia to the thriving, emotionally rich life of the camp. She keeps her friendship with the girls secret; Ray, whose brother was killed at Pearl Harbor, displays no fondness for the Japanese who work his farm. Creel does a delightful job of evoking first the dreariness of the Singleton farm and Olivia’s unnerving loneliness, then the slow ripening of her affection for Ray, a simple but profoundly kind and gentle man. Rose and Lorelei, meanwhile, hint that they have begun dating a pair of American soldiers, and Olivia drives them to meet the men in secret. But the “soldiers” turn out to be German POWs escaping with the help of the sisters, who make Olivia an unwitting accomplice. The author gives her heroine a satisfying emotional depth, moving Olivia through phases of affection and disappointment with assured confidence before closing with a tranquil scene after the baby is born.
A light, precisely observed novel.Pub Date: July 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-91027-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
A deeply moving look inside the Palestinian diaspora.
“Nostalgia is an affliction” a character states in Palestinian-American poet Alyan’s impressive first novel, which tracks the dispersal of four generations of a Palestinian family.
As matriarch Salma reads the future in a cup of coffee the night before her daughter Alia’s wedding in 1963, the Yacoub family has already been uprooted for 15 years. In the decades to come the Yacoubs’ distinctly personal experiences will mirror the experiences of immigrants and refugees around the world and the Palestinians’ dislocation in particular. Salma feels lucky; unlike others moved into resettlement camps when Israelis forced them from Jaffa, her husband’s wealth afforded them a house in Nablus. But transience has become the Yacoubs’ way of life. Alia’s older, more traditional sister, Widad, has already moved to Kuwait in an arranged marriage. When the Six-Day War breaks out in 1967, Alia happens to be visiting Widad in Kuwait City while her husband, Atef, and beloved brother, Mustafa, close friends and anti-occupation activists, remain trapped in Palestine. Only Atef makes it to Kuwait, with a secret guilt that will haunt him for years. Unlike her sister, the independent-minded Alia has married Atef, a professor, for love. Their difficult marriage becomes one of the novel’s most compelling elements as the couple creates a life in Kuwait with their three children—Riham, Karam, and Souad—until the 1990 Iraq-Kuwait war forces them to flee to Amman. Karam is sent to college in Boston and becomes an assimilated American despite summers with his kids in an inherited apartment in Beirut. Artsy Souad also ends up in Boston but never feels at home in America. After a divorce, she moves to Beirut, where she re-creates herself. While more traditionally religious than her relatively cosmopolitan siblings, Riham is as disturbed as any Western reader when her adolescent stepson flirts with political extremism. In the next generation, Souad’s daughter finds her own sense of displacement painful yet freeing. It’s not always easy to follow Alyan’s complex geographic and emotional mapping, but this journey is well worth taking.
A deeply moving look inside the Palestinian diaspora.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-91258-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Admirers of Ferrante’s work will eagerly await the third volume.
Roman à clef by the reclusive author who writes under the name Elena Ferrante (The Lost Daughter, 2008, etc.): a beautifully written portrait of a sometimes difficult friendship.
Set, as is so much of her work, in her native Naples, Italy, Ferrante’s latest is a study in the possibility of triumph over disappointment. Its narrator, Elena Greco, is the daughter of a man who has managed by dint of hard work to rise only to the lowly position of porter at the city government building. Elena is brilliant, but less so than her friend Raffaella Cerullo, called—confusingly, for readers without Italian—Lila or Lina depending on who is talking. Both women, born in the year of liberation, 1944, are ambitious, whip-smart, as at home in the pages of Aristotle as in the hills of their still-battered city. Their native milieu is poor and barely literate, but both have emerged from it, despite the distractions afforded by the boys they like and the violence occasionally visited by those whom they don’t. Lina has always outpaced Elena in every way, not least intellectually; as Elena recalls, “I saw that after half a page of the philosophy textbook she was able to find surprising connections between Anaxagoras, the order that the intellect imposes on the chaos of things, and Mendeleev’s tables.” That chaos, in the first volume of the trilogy to which this volume belongs, swept Lina away from her ambitions toward a domesticity that seems almost arbitrary, while Elena, the very definition of a survivor, forged on. Lina, it appears, will always consider her the lesser of equals, someone who, Elena frets, “couldn’t even imagine that I might change.” Yet, as Ferrante recounts, it is late-blooming Elena whose turn it is to flourish, despite setbacks and false starts; this second book closes with her embarking on what promises to be a brilliant literary career and with the hint that true love may not be far behind.
Admirers of Ferrante’s work will eagerly await the third volume.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60945-134-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
SEEN & HEARD
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