Despite an overly convoluted plot, this is an insightful and affecting look into the lives of those who risk everything to...
How living in Afghanistan profoundly affected a group of friends.
Canadian-American writer Béchard won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for his quirky and lyrical debut novel, Vandal Love. He draws upon his extensive experience as a foreign correspondent and photojournalist to fashion his second novel, an ambitious and nuanced story about a small group of friends in Kabul in the wake of 9/11. It’s divided into 10 parts covering nearly 40 years. Michiko, a Japanese-American journalist, narrates the sections titled with her name in Japanese characters, while the other sections, told in the third person, focus on three of her friends: Alexandra, a human rights lawyer; Justin, a born-again Christian from Louisiana who teaches English at a local school; and Clay, an ex-soldier and childhood friend of Justin’s who’s a private contractor. In the shadows lurks Idris, an Afghan student of Justin’s. Michiko begins in Kabul in March 2012, describing a Taliban attack on a house where these friends were attending a party. She tells us she's conducted a monthslong investigation revealing they were all nearly killed because of a “love triangle: a convoluted story of pettiness.” Two days later, Alexandra, Justin, and Clay die in a car-bomb attack. Idris was driving; he survived. Both of these incidents had to be “pieces of a larger plan that was still in the works. More people could die.” As the narrative—made up of Michiko’s investigation and the novel she’s writing—goes back and forth in time (1999, 1976, 2006, 1993, 2012) and place (Maine, Louisiana, Quebec, Dubai, Kabul), we learn about motives and betrayals. She fractures the "narrative, shifting the pieces, mixing them, inter-leafing [her] past and theirs.” Béchard does a fine job of describing the experiences and emotions of these friends and their “stories of courage” that “made no sense, only to burn away, to dissolve like smoke beneath the sun.”
Despite an overly convoluted plot, this is an insightful and affecting look into the lives of those who risk everything to help the people of Afghanistan and tell their stories.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-571-31114-6
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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