Nahai’s boisterous, sardonic, sometimes-lurid portrait of a community and the devil in its midst offers unusual, engrossing...
An energetically inventive epic, wrapped in a murder mystery, paints a broad picture of rapaciousness and revenge within the Iranian Jewish community of Los Angeles.
Confidently shepherding multiple characters over many decades and across two continents, Nahai (Sunday’s Silence, 2001, etc.) delivers a long, dark, broad–brush stroke saga that doubles as a primer to the 3,000-year-old history of the Jewish people of Iran. In her opening sentence she introduces the monster at the center of events, Raphael’s Son, found with his throat slashed in 2013. This beast of cruelty and deceit has many enemies, not least because of the gigantic Ponzi scheme he has been running that collapsed in 2008 but has left him apparently unpunished and no less wealthy. Then the story loops back to Raphael’s Son’s origins in 1950s Tehran. There, the Soleyman family has amassed great wealth, but owing to his sleepwalking, mysteriously glowing heart and bad health, eldest son Raphael will not live to inherit. Instead, his brother Aaron shoulders responsibility for the family’s money, to the fury of Raphael’s wife, known as the Black Bitch of Bushehr. Despite the impossible timing, she insists that her child is Raphael’s son and heir to the Soleyman fortune. This obsessive claim will lead to kidnapping, murder and much misery, until the Iranian revolution arrives, replacing old outrages with appalling new ones. Aaron’s widow flees to the United States, as does the unscrupulous Raphael’s Son, who has garnered a fortune from extortion. A second act of crime and punishment is played out in California among a close group of refugees who may have begun new lives but cannot escape the long reach of their histories, and that includes Raphael’s Son himself.
Nahai’s boisterous, sardonic, sometimes-lurid portrait of a community and the devil in its midst offers unusual, engrossing storytelling.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61775-321-3
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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