Joukhadar plunges the Western reader full force into the refugee world with sensual imagery that is immediate, intense, and...
The story of a contemporary girl's flight into exile from the Syrian civil war is deepened by the parallel tale of a 12th-century girl whose journey of discovery covers the same geography in Syrian-American writer Joukhadar's ambitious debut.
The poem in the shape of Syria that opens this novel—“O / beloved, you are / dying of a broken heart”—sets the tone of deep-rooted melancholy for the story that follows. Twelve-year-old Nour was born and raised in Manhattan by immigrant parents, her mother a cartographer and her father a bridge designer. Shortly after her father’s death from cancer in 2011, her mother moves Nour and her two older sisters, Huda and Zahra, to Homs, Syria, where they have relatives to help out. But soon bombs are dropping in Homs. As the family takes flight, Nour comforts herself with a fairy tale–like story her father used to tell, and Joukhadar weaves it into the narrative. "Everybody knows the story of Rawiya," she writes. "They just don't know they know it." The heroine, 16-year-old Rawiya, left her home in Ceuta—a Spanish city in North Africa where Nour’s parents once lived—to avoid starvation. Disguised as a boy, she apprenticed herself to al-Idrisi—an actual 12th-century mapmaker—as he traveled around charting trade routes. The route of Rawiya’s story corresponds with Nour’s as she finds and loses refuge in Jordan, Egypt, Libya, and Algeria. Passing as a boy for safety’s sake, as Rawiya did, Nour endures cold, hunger, and red tape. Though she lives at the epicenter of world crises, what affects her day to day are more personal crises experienced in bus terminals, small groceries, and dusty streets. More dramatically, her sister Huda is injured by a bomb and sexually attacked by a gang of boys; a family friend drowns when a ferry to Egypt catches fire. While Rawiya had a romantic adventure, Nour experiences the terrors of being a refugee. Yet both are fatherless girls growing into young womanhood, and they share a similar search for the meaning of home, both physical and spiritual.
Joukhadar plunges the Western reader full force into the refugee world with sensual imagery that is immediate, intense, and at times overwhelming.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6903-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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