HARBOR

Name: HARBOR
Author: Lorraine Adams
ISBN: 1-4000-4233-X

by Lorraine Adams ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2004

Adams runs the gamut from farce to horror. If her reach occasionally exceeds her grasp, that detracts only minimally from a...

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One of America’s oldest stories, the immigrant adventure, is magically new in this stunning debut about Algerians in Boston.

Aziz is 24, “a feather of a man,” but strong and resourceful enough to have survived 52 days as a stowaway in the hold of a tanker. Now, despite badly burned feet, he is swimming for dear life in Boston Harbor. In his first days on land he will bounce from some Egyptians, total strangers, to his one hometown contact, Rafik, to the hospital for foot surgery, and back to Rafik’s seedy one-bedroom apartment, shared by the latter’s American girlfriend and three other Algerians. America is a confusing hubbub for Aziz, yet it has the charm of a blank slate, this “pretty new nothing.” The pressure doesn’t let up as Aziz works like a dog to pay off those hospital bills, while navigating around Rafik (a liar who fences stolen merchandise, including bomb-making materials), learning English, and figuring out American body language. While Aziz remains the protagonist, the story fans out to include his kid brother Mourad (the lucky devil won a green card) and another stowaway, the charismatic go-getter Ghazi, whose scruples about Rafik lead him and Aziz to check out his storage locker, a move that will have dire repercussions. Through flashbacks, Adams, a veteran Washington Post reporter, makes brave forays into Algeria and its blood-soaked, byzantine factional strife, so we can understand why Aziz, fending off both the army and a band of murderous Islamists that abducted him, ran from the killing fields. Through it all, Aziz preserves an essential innocence, so it’s bitterly ironic that he becomes the prime suspect of a stumbling FBI task force trying to destroy an alleged terrorist cell. There’ll be no mercy for the innocent, but Rafik and his accomplice will somehow slip through the net.

Adams runs the gamut from farce to horror. If her reach occasionally exceeds her grasp, that detracts only minimally from a fine success.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004

ISBN: 1-4000-4233-X

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.