An overstuffed narrative and sloppy writing mar a novel that, despite it all, still has its moments.
A trio of storylines centers around the Partition of India.
Anwar’s debut novel is an ambitious one, with threads reaching back to World War II, to the more-or-less present day, and to 1970, to the devastating storm that killed half a million people in Bangladesh. The novel follows several storylines and a scattering of characters, straining by the end to bring them all together. To begin with, there’s Shahryar, a young father who lives in Washington, D.C., but was born in Bangladesh. Shahryar’s visa is about to expire, and he’s desperately casting about for a way to stay in the country with his daughter, Anna. Then there’s Claire Drake, a British doctor serving in World War II, first in Burma, and then in what was at that time East Bengal. There’s also Ichiro, a Japanese pilot shot down nearby, whom Claire must treat. There’s Rahim, too, a wealthy Muslim man living in Calcutta with his wife, Zahira, as that city erupts into riots in the midst of the Partition of India. To say the least, there’s a lot going on. Anwar ups the ante even further with additional twists: Rahim is kidnapped by a Hindu gang, and Shahryar is caught up in what may or may not be a conspiracy. At this point, the book is practically bursting at the seams. Why Anwar shoved all these characters into one book is unclear: They would have done just fine each in their own respective novels. His prose doesn’t help matters. It is sometimes overwrought (“a valley covered in cloaks of mist run ragged in places by trees crowned with fall’s incipient fire”) and sometimes plainly lacking (Zahira’s response when the police appear in the nick of time: “You…how…what?”). Still, Anwar has an engaging voice that will perhaps improve with practice.
An overstuffed narrative and sloppy writing mar a novel that, despite it all, still has its moments.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7450-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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 tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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