Disarmingly powerful—a nuanced story of female resilience that reaches across the ages.
A mysterious orphan becomes a saintly figure after discovering she has a miraculous gift in Payne’s medieval thriller debut.
The novel opens in Konya, Turkey in 1270, where Rumi, the poet and Sufi mystic, is approaching the end of his life. He has been called on to perform the funeral of a girl whose charred body has arrived in the possession of a partially tongueless monk. On attending to her, the poet is overcome by the scent of roses and discovers the girl to still be alive. The narrative then skips back to 1256 to describe the birth of Damascena in a Bulgarian monastery. The friar who assists in her delivery, Ivan Balev, is alarmed by the smell of roses that surrounds the child and by the arrival of a stork that seems to watch over her. After her mother’s disappearance, Damascena is left to be raised by the increasingly malevolent Ivan; as a young woman, she escapes the monastery. She discovers that she has the gift of turning roses into rose oil and is recognized as a saint. However, she again falls into the clutches of Ivan, who devises ways of exploiting her gift. The true meaning of her existence becomes clear only when she escapes to Turkey and encounters Rumi. Payne has crafted an absorbing page-turner whose plot unfolds at a satisfyingly unhurried pace. The author takes time to embellish the story with carefully crafted descriptions: “her long, dark hair—as shiny as a raven’s wing in the mid-day light.” The prose is beautifully uplifting, particularly when communicating the spiritual change Damascena’s gift brings to the monastery: “Young and old spoke of seeing God between the trees, within the trees, in the clouds and in the face of the sun.” There are rare occasions when the author’s descriptive approach is too heavy-handed; however, this detracts little from a thought-provoking story that, in many ways, echoes the tenor of Rumi’s work in its desire to understand the human condition and seek courage in vulnerability.
Disarmingly powerful—a nuanced story of female resilience that reaches across the ages.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9780982279762
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Skywriter Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.
An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work.
At the end of Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey departed Ireland for the second and final time—headed back to New York and the Italian American husband she had secretly married after first traveling there for work. In her hometown of Enniscorthy, she left behind Jim Farrell, a young man she’d fallen in love with during her visit, and the inevitable gossip about her conduct. Tóibín’s 11th novel introduces readers to Eilis 20 years later, in 1976, still married to Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbia with their two teenage children. But Eilis’ seemingly placid existence is disturbed when a stranger confronts her, accusing Tony of having an affair with his wife—now pregnant—and threatening to leave the baby on their doorstep. “She’d known men like this in Ireland,” Tóibín writes. “Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house.” This shock sends Eilis back to Enniscorthy for a visit—or perhaps a longer stay. (Eilis’ motives are as inscrutable as ever, even to herself.) She finds the never-married Jim managing his late father’s pub; unbeknownst to Eilis (and the town), he’s become involved with her widowed friend Nancy, who struggles to maintain the family chip shop. Eilis herself appears different to her old friends: “Something had happened to her in America,” Nancy concludes. Although the novel begins with a soap-operatic confrontation—and ends with a dramatic denouement, as Eilis’ fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton—the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s.
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781476785110
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
This tender, strange treatise on getting out from the “prefab structures” of a conventional life is quintessentially July.
A woman set to embark on a cross-country road trip instead drives to a nearby motel and becomes obsessed with a local man.
According to Harris, the husband of the narrator of July’s novel, everyone in life is either a Parker or a Driver. “Drivers,” Harris says, “are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring.” The narrator knows she’s a Parker, someone who needs “a discrete task that seems impossible, something…for which they might receive applause.” For the narrator, a “semi-famous” bisexual woman in her mid-40s living in Los Angeles, this task is her art; it’s only by haphazard chance that she’s fallen into a traditional straight marriage and motherhood. When the narrator needs to be in New York for work, she decides on a solo road trip as a way of forcing herself to be more of a metaphorical Driver. She makes it all of 30 minutes when, for reasons she doesn’t quite understand, she pulls over in Monrovia. After encountering a man who wipes her windows at a gas station and then chats with her at the local diner, she checks in to a motel, where she begins an all-consuming intimacy with him. For the first time in her life, she feels truly present. But she can only pretend to travel so long before she must go home and figure out how to live the rest of a life that she—that any woman in midlife—has no map for. July’s novel is a characteristically witty, startlingly intimate take on Dante’s “In the middle of life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood”—if the dark wood were the WebMD site for menopause and a cheap room at the Excelsior Motel.
This tender, strange treatise on getting out from the “prefab structures” of a conventional life is quintessentially July.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780593190265
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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