An affecting, if somewhat disorderly, tale of dislocation.
In Almohammad’s debut novel, a Syrian academic relocates to Southeast Asia and encounters seemingly bottomless reserves of racism and vitriol among its citizenry.
When Adam leaves Syria to pursue graduate studies in psychology in Malaysia, he experiences multiple incidents of febrile prejudice and ignorance, quickly learning that a “tanned Arab infidel” is about as much of a social pariah as one can be in the island country. The abuse he suffers is astonishing; one professor even asks him if he belongs to the Islamic State group. Women on the brink of falling in love with him seem tortured by his ethnic background, and fellow Arabs astound him with their arrant homophobia, disdain for Jews, and blinkered adherence to ersatz scientific studies that support their narrow-mindedness. He struggles to make ends meet as he’s denied any decent opportunities for employment, and he’s wounded by reports of his native country’s depredations. At the heart of the book, Almohammad’s protagonist wrestles with two parallel but contradictory ideas: first, his desire to be a global citizen is constantly stymied by the world’s rejection of his peaceable assimilation; second, his utter disgust, sometimes bordering on misanthropy, often undermines his desire to maintain a skeptical distance from rigid conviction. Consider the following aside, discussing a devout follower of God: “For me, this delusional douchebag is everything that is wrong with us and is precisely what I don’t want to be. Yet, I am not an atheist preacher....My core philosophy is that I might be wrong.” The story here is not without hope; despite Adam’s inability to fully find a home, he does find love and friends and successfully pursues his intellectual ambition. Almohammad, like Adam, is also a Syrian and a research fellow in psychology, and this fictional memoir seems clearly inspired by these autobiographical elements. The narration throughout is mercurial—sometimes lightheartedly hilarious, sometimes grimly brutal—which can be delightfully entertaining and also disjunctive. The work as a whole lacks a clear structure, so it often reads like a series of loosely assembled anecdotes, recounted conversations, and philosophical meditations. This couldn’t be a timelier book, though, and its power derives from the daring, uncompromising way it tells the truth about a world in danger of being lost to chaos.
An affecting, if somewhat disorderly, tale of dislocation.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9974815-0-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
Connelly takes a break from his Harry Bosch police novels (The Last Coyote, p. 328, etc.) for something even more intense: a reporter's single-minded pursuit of the serial killer who murdered his twin. Even his buddies in the Denver PD thought Sean McEvoy's shooting in the backseat of his car looked like a classic cop suicide, right clown to the motive: his despondency over his failure to clear the murder of a University of Denver student. But as Sean's twin brother, Jack, of the Rocky Mountain News, notices tiny clues that marked Sean's death as murder, his suspicions about the dying message Sean scrawled inside his fogged windshield—"Out of space. Out of time"—alert him to a series of eerily similar killings stretching from Sarasota to Albuquerque. The pattern, Jack realizes, involves two sets of murders: a series of sex killings of children, and then the executions (duly camouflaged as suicides) of the investigating police officers. Armed with what he's dug up, Jack heads off to Washington, to the Law Enforcement Foundation and the FBI. The real fireworks begin as Jack trades his official silence for an inside role in the investigation, only to find himself shut out of both the case and the story. From then on in, Jack, falling hard for Rachel Walling, the FBI agent in charge of the case, rides his Bureau connections like a bucking bronco—even as one William Gladden, a pedophile picked up on a low-level charge in Santa Monica, schemes to make bail before the police can run his prints through the national computer, then waits with sick patience for his chance at his next victim. The long-awaited confrontation between Jack and Gladden comes at an LA video store; but even afterward, Jack's left with devastating questions about the case. Connelly wrings suspense out of every possible aspect of Jack's obsessive hunt for his brother's killer. Prepare to be played like a violin.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-316-15398-2
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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