A measured and precise tale.
A successful doctor and mother suffers an emotionally abusive arranged marriage in Koduri’s novel.
Paru is a young medical student in 1970s Hyderabad, India, obsessed with the passion of Bollywood movies, the romance of novels like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and her fellow classmate Harsha. Their pairing is not to be, as Paru’s older brothers have publicly shamed their Brahmin family by marrying impulsively, leaving her father and mother to rush the 23-year-old Paru into an arranged marriage with Samar, a doctor who lives in America. Heartbroken over losing Harsha, Paru is nevertheless charmed by her new husband’s kind words and overeager lovemaking. But cracks begin to show even before she joins Samar in the U.S.; his family is greedy and demanding, and Samar himself shows signs of being imperious and controlling. This only worsens when Paru arrives in Chicago—her husband’s moods shift dramatically and unexpectedly, and he belittles her privately and publicly. Despite this, she still finds success in her new home, becoming a respected gynecologist and raising two bright, beautiful children. When Samar cheats on Paru with a resident, devotion and convention dictate forgiveness, but her cautious, contentious coexistence with Samar seems twice as torturous compared to the ease she feels around her newly reappeared first love, Harsha. Koduri’s prose is straightforward and at times almost mechanical, trading style for substance by punctuating scenes with particularly devastating or revelatory insights. (Paru’s mother, a lawyer, also struggles with traditional values: “Although she occasionally escaped them, Amma was still a woman bound by her conventions.”) Emotional subtlety and thematic cohesion pervade the novel—Harsha’s return doesn’t radically shift the narrative into a fantastical romance; instead, it illustrates a far more mature version of love, grounded in communication and respect, far from the Bollywood dance numbers the protagonist once dreamed of. The pacing can best be described as contemplative—the narrative captures what the day-to-day endurance of emotional strife looks like in practice.
A measured and precise tale.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9798891325517
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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