A touching, very simple tale made all the more powerful by its lack of artifice.
A Sri Lankan first-novelist, now based in Northamptonshire, describes the travails of a poor Saudi peasant who moves to the city to earn a living.
Originally self-published in 1999 in England, Chandraratna’s story (see above) became a great critical success in Britain and was nearly short-listed for the Booker Prize. It takes us into the harsh yet beautiful world of Sayeed, a simple Muslim farmer in an unnamed Middle Eastern country (clearly Saudi Arabia) who leaves his ancestral village to take a job as a hospital porter in the big city. Unused to urban life, Sayeed is unhappy among the crowds of strangers and foreigners thronging the streets each day, but he works hard and is able to save much more money than he could ever have earned at home. He works so hard, in fact, that his brother Mustafa worries he may soon be too old to marry. So Mustafa arranges a wedding for Sayeed to Latifah, a beautiful young widow from a good family, and Sayeed agrees to the match. Soon he and Latifah are wed, and Sayeed returns to the city with his new family (including Latifah’s little girl Leila). Sayeed had to borrow money for the wedding, and he now needs to work harder than ever to pay back the debt and provide for his wife and stepdaughter, but he is happy and proud of his new status as husband and father. The city, however, is full of new tensions: The increasing number of foreign workers (often well-paid technocrats from non-Muslim countries) who don’t share the local traditions has created a backlash among Islamic fundamentalists. Attempts to enforce traditional codes of behavior have become more and more strident—and women are under great scrutiny to conform to the old ways. Sayeed is no reformer by any stretch, but he soon finds his newfound happiness threatened—and eventually destroyed—by the backlash.
A touching, very simple tale made all the more powerful by its lack of artifice.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-57423-196-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Black Sparrow/Godine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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