Sharma delivers a rich and satisfying debut on the ties of family, love and culture—and how those ties are sometimes better...
From the Caribbean island of Trinidad comes a saga ripe with heartbreak and joy.
Trinidad is home to a striking diversity of people—descendants of African slaves, indentured Indians, Chinese laborers, Spanish colonizers and French land managers. American novelist Francis-Sharma, whose parents are Trinidadian immigrants, has a keen grasp of the customs and speech of the island’s human patchwork. In 1943, when Farouk Karam catches sight of teenage Marcia Garcia, she's raising two disabled toddlers, scraping by as a seamstress. Farouk, a police officer from a middle-class Hindu family, is smitten with Marcia and goes to the local obeah woman in Tunapuna, looking for help. Soon after, the toddlers mysteriously disappear, Marcia is bereft, and Farouk’s support leads to romance. They marry, but when Farouk brings Marcia to meet his parents, he's browbeaten by their disapproval and their revelation of the village gossip, which says the two lost boys were the children of Marcia and her father, who was driven from the village. Farouk wants the truth, but pride and a vow of silence prevent Marcia from speaking. Farouk leaves her and stays away until he can't bear it any longer—a pattern that repeats itself over two decades. Though they have four children, the Karams never live like a family (at least not for more than a few weeks, until someone’s temper flares). Marcia leaves for America, but the arranged job turns out to be akin to slavery. When she escapes and finds herself homeless in New York, her determination to survive and bring her children over only strengthens.
Sharma delivers a rich and satisfying debut on the ties of family, love and culture—and how those ties are sometimes better when broken.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9803-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The subject of parents charging past every ethical restraint in pursuit of crème de la crème education could not be more...
Four close friends, their husbands, their children, their housecleaners—and one application-only magnet school that will drive them all over the brink.
A Boulder-esque town in the Front Range of the Rockies, Crystal, Colorado, is a progressive paradise where four entwined families are raising their children, though death, divorce, and drugs have taken their toll on the group since the moms met at baby swim class years back. The women give each other mugs with friendship quotes each year on the anniversary of that meeting, and they get together every Friday morning for a 4-mile run, "a ritual carved into the flinty stone of their lives…shared since they'd first started trimming up again after the births of their children." Beneath the surface, resentments are already simmering—one family is far wealthier than the others; the widowed mom is a neurotic mess; one of the couples didn't make it through elementary school and he's remarried to "a hot young au pair who was great with the twins [and] a willing partner in mindblowing carnality." Then comes the announcement of a public magnet school for exceptional learners, with a standardized test as the first step in separating the wheat from the chaff. The novel's depiction of the ensuing devolution is grounded in acute social observation—class, race, privilege, woke and libertarian politics—then hits the mark on the details as well. From the bellowing of the dads on the soccer field to the oversharing in the teenager's vlog, down to the names of the kids themselves—twins Aidan and Charlie Unsworth-Chaudhury; best friends Emma Z and Emma Q; nerdy chessmaster Xander Frye—Holsinger's (The Invention of Fire, 2015) pitch is close to perfect.
The subject of parents charging past every ethical restraint in pursuit of crème de la crème education could not be more timely, and the Big Little Lies treatment creates a deliciously repulsive and eerily current page-turner.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53496-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
An intricate plot, perfect title, and a harrowing look at the tie that binds.
An absorbing story of a modern marriage framed in Greek mythology.
Groff’s sharply drawn portrait of a marriage begins on a cold Maine beach, with newlyweds “on their knees, now, though the sand was rough and hurt. It didn’t matter. They were reduced to mouths and hands.” This opener ushers in an ambitious, knowing novel besotted with sex—in a kaleidoscope of variety—much more abundant than the commune-dwellers got up to in Groff’s luminous Arcadia(2012). The story centers first on Lancelot “Lotto” Satterwhite, a dashing actor at Vassar, who marries his classmate, flounders, then becomes a famous playwright. Lotto’s name evokes the lottery—and the Fates, as his half of the book is titled. His wife, the imperial and striking Mathilde, takes over the second section, Furies, astir with grief and revenge. The plotting is exquisite, and the sentences hum; Groff writes with a pleasurable, bantering vividness. Her book is smart, albeit with an occasional vibrato of overkill. The author gives this novel a harder edge and darker glow than previous work, echoing Mathilde’s observation, “She was so tired of the old way of telling stories, all those too worn narrative paths, the familiar plot thickets, the fat social novels. She needed something messier, something sharper, something like a bomb going off.” Indeed it is.
An intricate plot, perfect title, and a harrowing look at the tie that binds.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59463-447-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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