Three Iranian sisters open a restaurant in rural Ireland—in a debut that uses recipes in the heart- and stomach-warming (or -churning, depending on one’s taste for the genre) tradition of Like Water for Chocolate.
Marjan, Bahar and Layla Aminpour escaped from Iran to arrive in England the day the Shah was deposed, seven years before the story begins. Now 27, Marjan brings 24-year-old Bahar, who has trained and worked in London as a nurse, and 15-year-old Layla to Ballinacroagh, in County Mayo, to open the Babylon Café. Each chapter opens with one of Marjan’s recipes, then intertwines the recipe into the events that follow. The villagers are your typical Irish stereotypes: bullying pub owner, narrow-minded gossip, goodhearted priest, lonely widow, disgraced actress turned hairdresser and unwed mother. While the locals resist at first, the magic of Marjan’s cooking soon wins them over. But the pub owner, Thomas McGuire, has eyes on the space the Aminpours have leased for their restaurant and vows to sink them. Meanwhile, his dreamy and handsome son (or at least his wife’s son) falls in love with Layla. As the leisurely soap opera of village life plays out—the priest puts on a play, the lonely widow mothers the sisters, the villain’s plot is foiled—readers also learn the heartbreaking story of the Aminpours’ flight from Iran. Raising her sisters after their parents’ deaths, Marjan was drawn into revolutionary activities by her childhood sweetheart and briefly imprisoned, while Bahar fell under the thumb of a fundamentalist neighbor and married the woman’s sadistic son. After a particularly vicious encounter with Bahar’s husband, the sisters fled. Now they’ve come to Ballinacroagh to hide from Bahar’s husband, who had tracked them to London. That stark story sits uneasily alongside the predictable comedy-drama of Ballinacroagh.
The mix of cutesy and harsh can be awkward, but first-timer Mehran’s lighthearted voice will win readers over.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6241-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
In this opener to Kennedy’s (Hot & Bothered, 2017, etc.) Briar U romance series, two likable students keep getting their signals crossed.
Twenty-one-year-old Summer Heyward-Di Laurentis is expelled from Brown University in the middle of her junior year because she was responsible for a fire at the Kappa Beta Nu sorority house. Fortunately, her father has connections, so she’s now enrolled in Briar University, a prestigious institution about an hour outside Boston. But as she’s about to move into Briar’s Kappa Beta Nu house, she’s asked to leave by the sisters, who don’t want her besmirching their reputation. Her older brother Dean, who’s a former Briar hockey star, comes to her rescue; his buddies, who are still on the hockey team, need a fourth roommate for their townhouse. Three good-looking hockey jocks and a very rich, gorgeous fashion major under the same roof—what could go wrong? Summer becomes quickly infatuated with one of her housemates: Dean’s best friend Colin “Fitzy” Fitzgerald. There’s a definite spark between them, and they exchange smoldering looks, but the tattooed Fitzy, who’s also a video game reviewer and designer, is an introvert who prefers no “drama” in his life. Summer, however, is a charming extrovert, although she has an inferiority complex about her flagging scholastic acumen. As the story goes on, the pair seem to misinterpret each other’s every move. Meanwhile, another roommate and potential suitor, Hunter Davenport, is waiting in the wings. Kennedy’s novel is full of sex, alcohol, and college-level profanity, but it never becomes formulaic. The author adroitly employs snappy dialogue, steady pacing, and humor, as in a scene at a runway fashion show featuring Briar jocks parading in Summer-designed swimwear. The book also manages to touch on some serious subjects, including learning disabilities and abusive behavior by faculty members. Summer and Fitzy’s repeated stumbles propel the plot through engaging twists and turns; the characters trade off narrating the story, which gives each of them a chance to reveal some substance.
A steamy, glitzy, and tender tale of college intrigue.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72482-199-7
Page Count: 372
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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