A textured, involving novel about a now-forgotten crisis in the pre-modern Muslim world.
A historical novel about a flash-point event in 19th-century relations between Muslims and the West.
Senocak’s densely researched, atmospheric novel, translated from the Turkish, turns on a little-known but notorious occurrence in the bustling Greek port city of Salonika in 1876. A young woman from Bulgaria, Stefana, converts to Islam after the death of her father, against the wishes of her mother, and goes to live in her Muslim lover’s household. While traveling through Salonika (during a period when it was under Ottoman rule), a crowd of Christians who protest her conversion abduct her, which, in turn, causes a riot among members of the city’s Muslim population. During the unrest, the Muslim crowd seizes the German and French consuls and carries them to a nearby mosque. After some frantic efforts at diplomacy by people on all sides, the mob hacks the consuls to death, sparking an international uproar between the governments of France and Germany and the Ottoman Empire. Senocak efficiently evokes this complicated story by grounding it in a multigenerational family saga, shifting between the buildup to the main event and other scenes a generation later—a canny choice that sustains the narrative tension. At the center of the story is Stefana, but the author also fleshes out many other characters and grippingly portrays the social and diplomatic tensions. Sometimes the characters can be wooden, and, at times, either the author or his translator offers unbelievable dialogue (“I can’t figure out what criteria the British have”). That said, Senocak handles the historical exposition with real skill, and readers never forget that his characters are truly living these events, minute by minute, as they unfold. During the Victorian era, the murder of the consuls threatened to bring on a major clash of civilizations—the Western nations even sent warships to Greek waters. In this book, Senocak does a nice job of balancing the immediacy of the crisis with its longer-term, personal effects.
A textured, involving novel about a now-forgotten crisis in the pre-modern Muslim world.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1505637953
Page Count: 204
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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