An unhurried but immersive tale of ambition and love.
A literary novel tells the story of a struggling Indian author in three romantic periods of her life.
Farida Cooper is interviewing to be an analyst in the consumer research department at the Chicago firm The Mandalay Market when she suddenly bursts into tears. Her interviewer, Percy Faber, has just told her that her lack of an MBA disqualifies her for such a position: “Her security rested on four supports: first, a job; next, an education to improve her chances for a better job; third, a home for sanctuary when the world became unmanageable; and last, a man to share her load.” Currently, all four things are threatened. The unemployed, 50-year-old aspiring author is 10 years into a master’s degree in English at a school that is trying to kick her out, and she will soon run out of money for rent. Percy, a widower who comes from the same Bombay Parsi community as Farida, takes pity on her and invents a position for her at the firm, and his interest in this intense woman grows the more he learns about her. Interwoven with Farida’s present are the stories of her two great romantic affairs: one with the celebrated literary theorist Horace Fisch and the other with Darius Katrak, a precocious 17-year-old student in Bombay to whom she was supposedly giving art lessons. The threads depict a female artist at three stages in her life, always finding herself at odds with the culture around her and claiming that rules are made to be broken. Desai’s prose is tidy and mannered in a way that mirrors its intellectual characters: “They finished in silence, Farida afraid she had focused too glaringly on herself, Percy wondering how he might help. Ascending in the elevator to the office again he invited her to a discussion of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.” It’s a long, slow novel that asks a lot of readers, particularly in its early sections in which Farida comes off as more than a little conceited. But as readers gain greater insight into the experiences that shaped Farida, the book becomes a satisfying, if somewhat antiquated, character study.
An unhurried but immersive tale of ambition and love.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2021
ISBN: 9798547971600
Page Count: 416
Publisher: KDP
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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