The clouds of a formulaic setup disperse to reveal a charmingly clear blue sky.
An eccentric museum in a neglected, stately English home becomes a heart-opening site of revelation, renewal, and second chances for a widow and her son.
A broken heart, a guilty conscience, a special needs child, homelessness, and joblessness are just the starting points for Harris’ busily plotted second novel, which draws inspiration from a real Victorian curiosity of a museum in southern England, where the author grew up. Enjoyably readable but overloaded, the narrative puts 54-year-old Cate Morris, still missing her husband, Richard, who died four years earlier by suicide, through the emotional wringer. Forced to relocate from London with Leo, her 19-year-old son, who has Down syndrome, Cate turns up at Hatters Museum of the Wide Wide World, where Richard’s long-dead grandfather, Colonel Hugo, assembled an extraordinary collection of stuffed animals and other artifacts harvested on trips to Africa and Asia. The museum is under threat, and Cate will try to save it, but her efforts are complicated by skeptical trustees, animal rights activists, a fire, and the inscrutable activities of an old retainer with links to the colonel. Cate’s emotional roller coaster swoops through bursts of introspection and self-recrimination interspersed with happier episodes with Leo and also Patch, a local artist and surprisingly ardent new lover. These mood swings, from grief and regret to rebirth and fairy tale—like the whistle-while-you-work team of locals that arrives to restore Hatters to order after the fire or Leo’s heroic speech to the nasty trustees—generate an unpredictability of tone, but Harris’ tale-spinning is good enough to keep the forward momentum going, often at breakneck speed. That a conclusion will be reached and that it will be satisfying are never in doubt.
The clouds of a formulaic setup disperse to reveal a charmingly clear blue sky.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2689-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.
A lifetime of friendship endures many upheavals.
Ellie and Homa, two young girls growing up in Tehran, meet at school in the early 1950s. Though their families are very different, they become close friends. After the death of Ellie’s father, she and her difficult mother must adapt to their reduced circumstances. Homa’s more warm and loving family lives a more financially constrained life, and her father, a communist, is politically active—to his own detriment and that of his family’s welfare. When Ellie’s mother remarries and she and Ellie relocate to a more exclusive part of the city, the girls become separated. They reunite years later when Homa is admitted to Ellie’s elite high school. Now a political firebrand with aspirations to become a judge and improve the rights of women in her factionalized homeland, Homa works toward scholastic success and begins practicing political activism. Ellie follows a course, plotted originally by her mother, toward marriage. The tortuous path of the girls’ adult friendship over the following decades is played out against regime change, political persecution, and devastating loss. Ellie’s well-intentioned but naïve approach stands in stark contrast to Homa’s commitment to human rights, particularly for women, and her willingness to risk personal safety to secure those rights. As narrated by Ellie, the girls’ story incorporates frequent references to Iranian food, customs, and beliefs common in the years of tumult and reforms accompanying the Iranian Revolution. Themes of jealousy—even in close friendships—and the role of the shir zan, the courageous “lion women” of Iran who effect change, recur through the narrative. The heartaches associated with emigration are explored along with issues of personal sacrifice for the sake of the greater good (no matter how remote it may seem).
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781668036587
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An emotionally acute study of manliness.
Scenes from the life of a well-off but emotionally damaged man.
Szalay’s sixth novel is a study of István, who as a 15-year-old in Hungary is lured into a sexual relationship with a married neighbor; when he has a confrontation with the woman’s husband, the man falls down the stairs and dies. Add in stints in a juvenile facility and as a soldier in Iraq, and István enters his 20s almost completely stunted emotionally. (Saying much besides “Okay” sometimes seems utterly beyond him.) Fueled by id, libido, and street drugs, he seems destined to be a casualty until, while working as a bouncer at a London strip club, he helps rescue the owner of a security firm who’s been assaulted; soon, he’s hired as the driver for a tycoon and his wife, with whom he begins an affair. István is a fascinating character in a kind of negative sense—he’s intriguing for all the ways he fails to confront his trauma, all the missed opportunities to find deeper connections. To that end, Szalay’s prose is emotionally bare, deliberately clipped and declarative, evoking István’s unwillingness (or incapacity) to look inside himself; he occasionally consults with a therapist, but a relentless passivity keeps him from opening up much. His capacity to fail upwards eventually catches up with him, and the novel becomes a more standard story about betrayal and inheritances, but it also turns on small but meaningful moments of heroism that suggest a deeper character than somebody who, as someone suggests, “exemplif[ies] a primitive form of masculinity.” István’s relentlessly stony approach to existence grates at times—there are a few too many “okay”s in the dialogue—but Szalay’s distanced approach has its payoffs. Being closed off, like István, doesn’t close off the world, and at times has tragic consequences.
An emotionally acute study of manliness.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781982122799
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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