The sympathetic and flawed lead character puts a haunting human face on contemporary Russia, often demonized by the media.
A successful businessman’s involvement with a woman determined to rescue sex trafficking victims exposes the underbelly of the New Russia in this noir-esque character study.
Nikolai Delov, pushing age 50, co-owns with his brother “the largest family-owned trucking company in the Russian Federation,” a company his truck driver father founded. Delov is a public success. He proudly displays a photo of himself receiving an entrepreneurial award from President Boris Yeltsin (“A perfect example of what a renewed Russia is all about”). His private life, though, is in more of a shambles. Divorced, he suffers strained relations with his son, Valentin, a talented artist with no interest in joining the family business, who is trying to open his own gallery. One morning, Delov is visited by Inessa Zorina, who runs a foundation that provides “ ‘safe environments’ for girls escaping the sex trade.” In their initial meeting, she is simply seeking a financial donation to establish housing for the young women, but things get interesting when she prevails upon him to help her rescue a young woman from her pimp. The entrepreneur’s growing relationship with Zorina puts him at further odds with powerful business rival Vladimir Konstantinov, the scion of a Yeltsin-era oligarch. Delov uses this competitor as a benchmark to measure his own success (“An unfair standard…since Vladimir Konstantinov was anything but a truck driver’s son”). Is Konstantinov jealous of Delov and Zorina’s affair? Is it just a coincidence that Valentin is arrested and charged with being a Banksey-like covert graffiti-tagger? In a striking plot development, Delov himself comes under investigation when it appears a branch of his company is involved in the trafficking of young women. Dante (The Tiger’s Wedding, 2012) has crafted an engrossing novel with an evocative and authentic sense of place and an engaging protagonist facing myriad challenges (“If something dire happened to him, what might become of the company?”). In noir tradition, Delov finds his world upended by dark forces of which he is aware but had always been able to navigate. “Corruption is a terrible thing,” he notes at one point, “until it works in your favor.” That is a statement as true in Putin-era Russia as it was in Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles or Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Chicago.
The sympathetic and flawed lead character puts a haunting human face on contemporary Russia, often demonized by the media.Pub Date: July 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-91225-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Omsk Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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