A well-crafted structure and a troubled but engaging narrator power this moving story of Syrian refugees.
The human stories behind news images of Syrian war refugees emerge in a novel both touching and terrifying.
Lefteri (A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible, 2011) is the child of refugees, raised in London after her parents fled Cyprus in the 1970s. This novel’s characters are fleeing a different war, the current, devastating civil war in Syria. Politics are barely mentioned in the book, though—when war has destroyed your home and livelihood, blinded your wife and killed your young son, the reasons for that war lose their meaning. The novel follows Nuri and Afra Ibrahim as they escape from Aleppo and make the perilous journey to Britain after their son, Sami, dies. Nuri narrates the book; its chapters alternate gracefully among the golden prewar past, the struggle to gain legal refugee status in England in the present, and the journey in between, a long nightmare of chaotically crowded refugee camps, life-threatening sea crossings, and smugglers eager to exploit them. In Aleppo, Afra was an artist; Nuri was the titular beekeeper, a job he loved, in business with his cousin and dearest friend, Mustafa. The war leaves Nuri and Afra no choice but to leave, but her blindness and emotional trauma mean that he must be her caretaker as well as grappling with the bewildering navigation to another country. Along the way, he also becomes the guardian of Mohammed, a lost boy about the same age as Sami. Lefteri says in her author’s note that the book was inspired by her volunteer work in a refugee camp in Athens, and Nuri’s story rings with authenticity, from the vast, impersonal cruelties of war to the tiny kindnesses that help people survive it. Nuri wants to be the strong one, but Lefteri subtly, slowly shows the reader how deep his wounds are as well.
A well-crafted structure and a troubled but engaging narrator power this moving story of Syrian refugees.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984821-21-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In this vivid and moving book, Orange articulates the challenges and complexities not only of Native Americans, but also of...
Orange’s debut novel offers a kaleidoscopic look at Native American life in Oakland, California, through the experiences and perspectives of 12 characters.
An aspiring documentary filmmaker, a young man who has taught himself traditional dance by watching YouTube, another lost in the bulk of his enormous body—these are just a few of the point-of-view characters in this astonishingly wide-ranging book, which culminates with an event called the Big Oakland Powwow. Orange, who grew up in the East Bay and is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, knows the territory, but this is no work of social anthropology; rather, it is a deep dive into the fractured diaspora of a community that remains, in many ways, invisible to many outside of it. “We made powwows because we needed a place to be together,” he writes. “Something intertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work toward, for our jewelry, our songs, our dances, our drum.” The plot of the book is almost impossible to encapsulate, but that’s part of its power. At the same time, the narrative moves forward with propulsive force. The stakes are high: For Jacquie Red Feather, on her way to meet her three grandsons for the first time, there is nothing as conditional as sobriety: “She was sober again,” Orange tells us, “and ten days is the same as a year when you want to drink all the time.” For Daniel Gonzales, creating plastic guns on a 3-D printer, the only lifeline is his dead brother, Manny, to whom he writes at a ghostly Gmail account. In its portrayal of so-called “Urban Indians,” the novel recalls David Treuer’s The Hiawatha, but the range, the vision, is all its own. What Orange is saying is that, like all people, Native Americans don’t share a single identity; theirs is a multifaceted landscape, made more so by the sins, the weight, of history. That some of these sins belong to the characters alone should go without saying, a point Orange makes explicit in the novel’s stunning, brutal denouement. “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them,” James Baldwin wrote in a line Orange borrows as an epigraph to one of the book’s sections; this is the inescapable fate of every individual here.
In this vivid and moving book, Orange articulates the challenges and complexities not only of Native Americans, but also of America itself.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52037-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
In the contest of Most Winning Combination, it would be hard to beat grumpy Ove and his hidden, generous heart.
Originally published in Sweden, this charming debut novel by Backman should find a ready audience with English-language readers.
The book opens helpfully with the following characterizations about its protagonist: “Ove is fifty-nine. He drives a Saab. He’s the kind of man who points at people he doesn’t like the look of, as if they were burglars and his forefinger a policeman’s torch.” What the book takes its time revealing is that this dyed-in-the-wool curmudgeon has a heart of solid gold. Readers will see the basic setup coming a mile away, but Backman does a crafty job revealing the full vein of precious metal beneath Ove’s ribs, glint by glint. Ove’s history trickles out in alternating chapters—a bleak set of circumstances that smacks an honorable, hardworking boy around time and again, proving that, even by early adulthood, he comes by his grumpy nature honestly. It’s a woman who turns his life around the first time: sweet and lively Sonja, who becomes his wife and balances his pessimism with optimism and warmth. By 59, he's in a place of despair yet again, and it’s a woman who turns him around a second time: spirited, knowing Parvaneh, who moves with her husband and children into the terraced house next door and forces Ove to engage with the world. The back story chapters have a simple, fablelike quality, while the current-day chapters are episodic and, at times, hysterically funny. In both instances, the narration can veer toward the preachy or overly pat, but wry descriptions, excellent pacing and the juxtaposition of Ove’s attitude with his deeds add plenty of punch to balance out any pathos.
In the contest of Most Winning Combination, it would be hard to beat grumpy Ove and his hidden, generous heart.Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3801-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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