An inspirational, unlikely hero kicks off an impossible, at times repetitive, tale of innovation and its enemies.
Hultine presents the first installment in a historically rich series about a miraculous invention.
Elina Khan lives in Afghanistan with her father, Emal, in the 2000s, and things are not great in the Indus Valley. Drought conditions in the area have many people worried about simply surviving. Then there are fears of the Taliban, a group that’s willing to punish people for innocuous acts like playing chess. They are absolutely intolerant of the idea of education for women, yet American forces have managed to build a school for girls where Elina lives. Elina proves a sharp student and, with the help of an American doctor, she learns a lot. In time, Elina herself becomes a teacher. Things take a turn, however, when she gives a lesson on plate tectonics. As one unhappy student points out, “Miss Khan, earthquakes are caused by Allah, not cataclysmic events defined through theoretical means.” Out of safety concerns (a threatening note is delivered objecting to Elina’s “blasphemous” teachings), the school is closed, but Elina is not done learning or teaching. She recognizes that much of the world’s problems, and specifically Afghanistan’s problems, stem from issues around energy use. She comes up with a solution she calls “The Mining Option” and creates a flowchart to illustrate how it works. It is a modest beginning, but perhaps The Mining Option can change the world. The story of this industrious young woman is not without bloodshed; violence comes in the form of Kalashnikov-toting fighters and, in early chapters depicting ancient times, a tiger hunt. The action helps maintain momentum even as some information is repeated—the drought in Afghanistan and its effects are described multiple times, and it is perhaps unnecessary to point out that “even the wealthiest farmers in their valley were surely concerned about the drought.” But the compelling question remains as to what will happen to Elina and her flowchart; she developed an impressive idea under dire conditions, and perhaps there will be no stopping her.
An inspirational, unlikely hero kicks off an impossible, at times repetitive, tale of innovation and its enemies.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 119
Publisher: manuscript
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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