A tragedy for our time.
As in her novel about Sarajevo (Twice Born, 2011), Mazzantini explores displacement and the effect of political chaos on individual lives in this extremely brief but intense story of Libyans seeking refuge in Italy and Italians seeking their lost past in Libya.
The novel divides into three loosely connected sections written in prose stripped down to the essentials. The Bedouin child Farid lives in an oasis town on the edge of the Sahara with his young mother, Jamila, and his father, Omar, who installs TV antennas for a living. Although the family is basically apolitical, Farid is vaguely aware that a war is occurring. Then Omar is killed by loyalist troops. Farid and Jamila quickly leave their home. Mother and son survive desert travel and make their way onto a boat they hope will take them to Italy. Farid’s great-grandfather traveled over the same sea years earlier and never returned, but Farid “looks at the sea and thinks of paradise.” His hopefulness is heartbreaking in its simplicity. Meanwhile, on the Italian coast, Vito is at loose ends after graduating from high school. His mother, Angelina, a divorced teacher, is an intimidating yet inspiring iconoclast shaped by her experience living the first 11 years of her life in Libya. In a history paper for school, Vito has written about the experience of the “Tripolini”—Italians banished from Libya when Gadhafi came to power. Vito’s grandparents, Angelina’s parents, arrived in Libya separately as children just before World War II. Born in 1959, Angelina considered Tripoli her only home until the family’s forced return to Italy. Angelina’s parents never readjusted to their native country; Angelina learned to fit in but remained nostalgic. When Gadhafi opened Libya to the West, Angelina visited but nothing was as she remembered. While Vito begins a collage from debris of capsized boats he has collected while walking on the beach, Farid and Jamali spend days at sea, helpless against the elements.
A tragedy for our time.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78074-633-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Although the author acknowledges in a postscript that his story is perhaps “too episodic,” his life of Sam Hell is inspiring...
Quite a departure from Dugoni’s dark novels about Detective Tracy Crosswhite (The Trapped Girl, 2017, etc.): the frankly inspirational tale of a boy who overcomes the tremendous obstacles occasioned by the color of his eyes.
Samuel James Hill is born with ocular albinism, a rare condition that makes his eyes red. Dubbed “the devil boy” by his classmates at Our Lady of Mercy, the Catholic school his mother, Madeline, fights to get him into, he faces loneliness, alienation, and daily ridicule, especially from David Freemon, a merciless bully who keeps finding new ways to torment him, and Sister Beatrice, the school’s principal and Freemon’s enabler, who in her own subtler ways is every bit as vindictive as he is. Only the friendship of two other outsiders, African-American athlete Ernie Cantwell and free-spirited nonconformist Michaela Kennedy, allows him to survive his trying years at OLM. In high school, Sam finds that nearly every routine milestone—the tryouts for the basketball team, the senior prom, the naming of the class valedictorian—represents new challenges. Even Sam’s graduation is blasted by a new crisis, though this one isn’t rooted in his red eyes. Determined to escape from the Bay Area suburb of Burlingame, he finds himself meeting the same problems, often embodied in the very same people, over and over. Yet although he rejects his mother’s unwavering faith in divine providence, he triumphs in the end by recognizing himself in other people and assuming the roles of the friends and mentors who helped bring him to adulthood. Dugoni throws in everything but a pilgrimage to Lourdes, and then adds that trip as well.
Although the author acknowledges in a postscript that his story is perhaps “too episodic,” his life of Sam Hell is inspiring and aglow with the promise of redemption.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-4900-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
Cha’s storytelling shows how fiction can delicately extract deeper revelations from daily headlines.
A real-life racial incident is transfigured into a riveting thriller about two families’ heartbreaking struggles to confront and transcend rage and loss.
It is the late summer of 2019, but no matter how many years have passed, Shawn Matthews, a black ex-convict now working for a Los Angeles moving company, is burdened by memories of the early spring of 1991, when his teenage sister Ava was shot to death by a Korean woman who mistakenly believed she was stealing from her convenience store. The shooting and the resulting trial—in which the woman was convicted and received no jail time, after which she relocated to another part of LA—fed into racial tensions already festering back then from the Rodney King trial. And the city’s reactions to a present-day shooting death of an unarmed black teen by a police officer indicate that those racial animosities remain close to the boiling point. In the midst of the mounting furor, Grace Park, a young Korean woman, is shaken from her placid good nature by the sight of her mother being wounded in a drive-by shooting. “What if she is being punished?” her sister Miriam says, revealing a shocking fact about their mother's past that Grace hadn't known. An LAPD detective asks Shawn if he has an alibi for the drive-by (which he does). Nonetheless, the most recent shooting upends his fragile sense of security, and he starts to wonder where his cousin, Ray, himself just released from prison, was when Grace’s mother was shot. Cha, author of the Juniper Song series of detective novels (Dead Soon Enough, 2015, etc.), brings what she knows about crafting noir-ish mysteries into this fictionalized treatment of the 1991 Latasha Harlins murder, blending a shrewd knowledge of cutting-edge media and its disruptive impact with a warm, astute sensitivity toward characters of diverse cultures weighed down by converging traumas.
Cha’s storytelling shows how fiction can delicately extract deeper revelations from daily headlines.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-286885-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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