The humor seems strained in this comedy of errors, manners, and money.
A middle-aged Delhi couple find themselves suddenly wealthy.
Mr. and Mrs. Jha are no longer young when they suddenly come into a great deal of money. Mr. Jha has sold a website he created. The money allows the Jhas to move from their East Delhi housing complex to Gurgaon, a much ritzier neighborhood, where each house has a gate, a guard, and sometimes a swimming pool. Mr. Jha throws himself into their new lifestyle, ordering a couch embedded with Swarovski crystals (which turns out to be as uncomfortable as it sounds). Mrs. Jha, meanwhile, can’t convince herself to use the new hot showers, preferring instead to stick with the bucket and mug she’s used to. In the meantime, the Jhas’ son, Rupak, is studying for his MBA in New York. His parents don’t know it yet, but he’s failing his classes. Worse, he’s trying to balance two women: Indian Serena, who rather resembles his mother; and blonde, American Elizabeth, whom Rupak can’t imagine fitting in to his Indian life. Basu’s debut novel is a funny, deceptively light treatment of money and manners in modern-day Delhi. Mr. Jha suffers from a bad case of keeping-up-with-the-Joneses—though in this case it’s the Chopras next door, and they’ve gone so far as to have a reproduction of the Sistine Chapel installed in their foyer ceiling. Then, too, there’s Mrs. Ray, a young widow from the Jhas’ old neighborhood who is soon thrown together with Mr. Chopra’s well-to-do brother, with predictable results. Basu manages these various storylines well, and her writing is sincere. But at times the humor feels forced, strained. Each of the characters is flawed, but those flaws seem to elicit pity rather than sympathy. At a certain point, their moneyed lives don’t seem as funny as they do alienating and sad. There’s something unsettling about all this that the ending does nothing to assuage, though it seems to want to.
The humor seems strained in this comedy of errors, manners, and money.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-451-49891-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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 tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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