by Fred Howard ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 26, 2017
An engrossing mystery about secrets in an old Southern town that delivers a plea for unity.
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A Southern minister befriends a Muslim professor accused of murdering a local business owner in this novel.
The town of August Valley, Georgia, is known for being a bastion of Christian fundamentalism, but the Rev. Ike Benheart broke with the Baptist Church and became a pastor at the Unitarian Universalist Church. A few hundred congregants followed him to his new spiritual home, where he takes pride in being a liberal voice in a conservative county. One morning, a local businessman, Lee Street, is found dead, and suspicion falls on Ismael Hagarson, an August Valley native and university professor of Bangladeshi descent. Street was about to sell his old department store to the local Islamic community, represented by Hagarson, for use as a mosque, but the businessman changed his mind at the last moment, and some, including Benheart, think he’d been pressured by the city council. Hagarson’s argument with Street’s realtor is enough for the police to arrest and charge the professor with murder. Curious about the case, Benheart visits the jail to meet Hagarson, who swears he is innocent. Hagarson hires a lawyer, but Benheart decides to dig further, convinced the city council had something to do with the nixed mosque deal. Benheart is surprised to learn his parents knew and helped resettle Hagarson’s mother, Gera, when she came to the U.S. from Bangladesh. With the town in an anti-Muslim uproar, Benheart begins to piece together the story of Gera’s struggles as he tries to help free the man that he is much more closely connected to than he first realized. Howard’s (Transforming Faith, 2014) tale, though ostensibly a mystery, paints a vivid picture of a conservative Southern town that, because of its military base and university, confronts social issues head-on. His protagonist is a thoughtful one, but above all he’s a humanist. Benheart’s desire to see everyone as a three-dimensional soul regardless of categories is what drives him, and the novel goes beyond the standard mystery in its hope of getting to the root of people’s differences. Interestingly, the book reaches its climactic peak as it goes back in time to document the story of Gera’s escape from Asia during the Pakistani civil war, a rich, rugged storyline that is as informative as it is compelling.
An engrossing mystery about secrets in an old Southern town that delivers a plea for unity.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5408-9480-9
Page Count: 234
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Roy Jacobsen ; translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2020
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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by Roy Jacobsen ; translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw
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by Roy Jacobsen translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw
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by Roy Jacobsen & translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw
by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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