A deeply emotional story about the Indian diaspora.
In Seeripat’s novel, a desperate Indian woman on the run with her two small children pays a steep price to keep her family safe from the horrors of indentured servitude.
It’s the late 1800s, and the only chance that Shivali Tewari and her family have at survival lies far away on a South African sugar cane plantation in Port Natal (now Durban), where they hope to find work as laborers. Fleeing the misogyny of her native Indian village of Ishapur, Shivali lives only to protect her daughter, Uma, and son, Hari. Although she’s plagued by guilt after killing her violent husband, Shivali will kill again if she must. For weeks, the family bears the oppressive confinement of the holding yard, waiting for the S.S.Umzimkulu to finally fulfill its quota of cheap human labor and set sail for the new land. However, the ship is a nightmarish place where “fights among men and the rape of women and men were regular events with consequences that would haunt us forever.” Themes of brutality are contrasted with those of familial love and kindness throughout Seeripat’s often moving saga. Shivali, Uma, Hari, and newly adopted members of their ragtag family are sent to Thompson’s Farm upon arrival in Port Natal, and they spend the next 10 years attempting to pursue lives of meaning and purpose under the yoke of institutionalized racism and colonial degradation. Seeripat is especially effective at relating the family’s grim odyssey by alternating between the first-person perspectives of Shivali, Uma, and Hari; at one point, for instance, Uma reminds readers, “The English didn’t really want women on the plantations. They were scared we would have babies and then there would be more Brown people than white ones in Natal. Imagine the horror of Brown people taking over!” Shivali’s inner turmoil is truly heartbreaking, and Uma’s unlikely romance with the plantation owner’s son, Richard, is rendered with all the beauty and ugliness that their world has to offer.
A deeply emotional story about the Indian diaspora.Pub Date: April 12, 2024
ISBN: 9798989650927
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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