bookshelf

WILD MULBERRIES

Name: WILD MULBERRIES
Author: Iman Humaydan Younes
ISBN: 978-1-56656-700-8

by Iman Humaydan Younes & translated by Michelle Hartman ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2008

A messy work that will not enhance Younes’s reputation.

bookshelf

Set in 1930s Lebanon, this short formless offering from the Lebanese author of B as in Beirut (2007) is a diffuse mood piece until it lurches into a helter-skelter chronicle of domestic upheaval.

Sarah is a lonely, unhappy adolescent, the only child of her father’s second marriage. She lives in a large house in a Lebanese village with her father, her half-brother and her aunt; the two men loathe each other. She pines for her mother, who vanished when she was very young; her life is defined by her absence. Her wealthy landowning father, over 60, is cold and distant, tending to his silkworm business; her aunt Shams is a scold; only her half-brother hugs and kisses her. Sarah spends much of her time daydreaming in a walnut tree until she breaks her leg and is bedridden for two months. The silkworm business occupies the foreground, as her father bullies the migrant workers and deceives his foreman with empty promises. Rumors and tensions abound. Did Sarah’s father swindle his father-in-law out of his lands? Was that why her mother left him? Christian missionaries come calling, offending Shams, a strict Druze. Sarah’s teacher, an Englishwoman, is sending love-letters to her brother. Suddenly, without foreshadowing, Sarah is a young woman in love, exchanging passionate kisses with her brother’s friend Karim, who works for a British oil company. Skipping the courtship, Younes marries them off and sends them on a business trip to England. Sarah tracks down a friend of her mother’s, but her memory’s gone. Back in Lebanon she gives birth to a daughter; the birth comes on the heels of her father’s death. All that emerges with clarity from this crush of events is Sarah’s realization that her quest for her mother has been a waste of time and that a change of scene solves nothing.

A messy work that will not enhance Younes’s reputation.

Pub Date: July 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-1-56656-700-8

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Interlink

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

bookshelf

BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

bookshelf

Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

bookshelf

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

bookshelf

A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.