In a setting as menacing as any bad dream, Palestinian writer Nasrallah explores the nature of personal identity in a remote desert village. When five men arrive in the middle of the night to announce that, like all the teachers in the area, he'll have to pay for his burial expenses and being dead did not exempt him, the narrator is naturally startled. When he protests that he's not dead yet, that his heart is still beating, and when the visitors reply with one voice, ``That's no proof you're alive,'' he is even more alarmed. He notices then that the other bed in the room that he shares with a fellow teacher, who coincidentally (or not) also shares his name, is empty: His namesake has disappeared. This problem becomes more an existential dilemma of Who Am I? than a real search for a missing colleague. And as he tries to resolve it, the narrator, a schoolteacher sent on contract to this remote region of the Arabian peninsula, describes the villagers' narrow lives and their aversion to strangers. People disappear and the villagers don't seem to care—``...nobody asked about his absence. Was Ustadh Muhammad just a small insect who came and left without anyone noticing?'' It's a place where mosquitoes abound, wolves howl outside, and inside their stone rooms the villagers sit, ``lamps extinguished, realizing things would never change and that its parched wound would always lie open to the sky.'' It's a place where fevers of the body and the mind are rife. A flight into saving madness is perhaps inevitable in such a hellish place and situation. An accomplished first novel, almost poetic in its lyrically intense evocation of place, that limns skillfully the horrors of dissonance and disintegration in an unfamiliar setting.
Pub Date: March 15, 1993
ISBN: 1-56656-103-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1993
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
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