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THE MOONLIT CAGE

Oprah’s audience might very well enjoy and admire this one.

Biology looms as destiny, then becomes a spur to freedom and accomplishment in the Canadian YA author’s heartfelt second adult historical (after The Linnet Bird, 2005).

It’s a carefully researched portrayal of three 19th-century cultures, centered in the figure of its narrator, Daryâ, a young Muslim woman we first encounter in her tribal village in Afghanistan. Exhibiting both high spirits and a hunger for “forbidden” knowledge (she furtively reads her father’s copy of the Qur’an), Daryâ incurs the anger of her domineering father, and is further oppressed by the new wife (Sulima), whom he takes when her mother fails to bear him a son. And when Daryâ finds Sulima in the embrace of another man, her irate stepmother pronounces a curse of barrenness on the girl. Her father sells her to a nomadic tribe, whereupon she becomes the abused wife of a haughty chieftain’s son, Shaliq. It seems she’ll never fulfill the independent destiny toward which her late grandmother Mâdar Kalân (the only strong woman Daryâ has ever known) had pointed her. The best sections here are in these potently detailed early chapters, succeeded by Daryâ’s escape from Shaliq, passage to India (Bombay) accompanied by mild-mannered Englishman David Ingram, who, for reasons of his own, cannot be the man she desires and needs, and thence—as the traveling companion of an exploiter (“Mr. Bull”) who might have come out of a Dickens novel—to Victorian London, which is itself something less than a nirvana for a woman alone. The choice of Daryâ as narrator provides needed unity and elicits reader empathy, but limits Holeman’s somewhat oblique presentation of cultural inequities and ironies. Still, her heroine’s tale is a stirring and exemplary one, and the novel seems a natural for reading groups.

Oprah’s audience might very well enjoy and admire this one.

Pub Date: March 27, 2007

ISBN: 0-307-34649-8

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007

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ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE

Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.

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Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.

In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.

Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.

Pub Date: May 6, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014

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IN THE DISTANCE

Not for the faint of heart, perhaps, but an ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.

Violent, often surrealistic Wild West yarn, Cormac McCarthy by way of Gabriel García Márquez.

Håkan Söderström is a force of nature, a wild giant whose name, in the frontier America in which he has landed, is rendered as the Hawk. On the docks back in Gothenburg he was separated from his brother, Linus, and he has sworn to find him in a land so big he can scarcely comprehend it. The Hawk lands in California and ventures eastward only to find himself in all kinds of odd company—crooks, con men, prophets, and the rare honest man—and a tide of history that keeps pushing him back to the west. Along the way, his exploits, literary scholar Diaz (Hispanic Institute/Columbia Univ.; Borges, Between History and Eternity, 2012) writes, are so numerous that he has become a legend in a frontier full of them; for one thing, says an awe-struck traveler, “He was offered his own territory by the Union, like a state, with his own laws and all. Just to keep him away.” The Hawk protests that most of what has been said about him is untrue—but not all of it. As Diaz, who delights in playful language, lists, and stream-of-consciousness prose, reconstructs his adventures, he evokes the multicultural nature of westward expansion, in which immigrants did the bulk of the hard labor and suffered the gravest dangers. One fine set piece is a version of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which religious fanatics dressed as Indians attack a pioneer party—save that in Diaz’s version, Håkan tears his way across the enemy force with a righteous fury befitting an avenging angel. “He knew he had killed and maimed several men,” Diaz writes, memorably, “but what remained most vividly in his mind was the feeling of sorrow and senselessness that came with each act: those worth defending were already dead, and each of his killings made his own struggle for self-preservation less justifiable.”

Not for the faint of heart, perhaps, but an ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.

Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-56689-488-3

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Coffee House

Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017

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