A masterwork of modern European letters that should earn the author a wide readership outside his homeland.
Vast, generous-spirited story of family across the face of the 20th century in the turbulent Balkans.
“Around the subject of my elder uncle there was silence.” So writes the prolific Bosnia-born Croatian journalist, novelist, and poet Jergović at the beginning of this epic. That silence, born of an accident of history and bloodlines, surrounds much of his family in this blend of memoir and fiction. (It is seldom clear where fact shades into invention.) The uncle’s maternal grandfather, Jergović’s great-grandfather, was an ethnic German who spoke only German to his children, and although his Croatian and Slovene sons-in-law spoke German fluently, he spoke to them only in their languages. Fastidious about his Germanness and the difference of others, that great-grandfather nonetheless stood alongside Jews, Turks, Croatians, Hungarians, Bulgarians, and all the other diverse people who made up the population of Sarajevo; during World War II, when those ethnic distinctions were made matters of life and death, he sheltered his neighbors from the Croatian fascists, the Ustaše, “not primarily because he was a good and unselfish man, but because they were an important part of his own world.” In short, Opapa couldn’t imagine a monocultural life. Jergović himself, old enough to remember life in socialist Yugoslavia before it splintered in civil war, recounts being breastfed at birth by “an unknown Muslim woman,” further evidence of universality in a time of ethnic hatred. Jergović’s pages are peppered with walk-ons from Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian history, such as a feared interrogator who, after retiring, “had a small house with a large garden full of roses, which he cared for himself, breeding some and buying others from various parts of the world.” Even monsters, it seems, are susceptible to beauty. There is beauty aplenty, and ample monstrosity, in Jergović’s account, as well as many moments of mystery: a beekeeper’s coded journal, the alpenglow that surrounds Sarajevo as surely as a besieging army, the “living torment” that is existence, all come under Jergović’s empathetic eye.
A masterwork of modern European letters that should earn the author a wide readership outside his homeland.Pub Date: June 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-939810-52-6
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism.
Three woman who join together to rent a large space along the beach in Los Angeles for their stores—a gift shop, a bakery, and a bookstore—become fast friends as they each experience the highs, and lows, of love.
Bree is a friendly but standoffish bookstore owner who keeps everyone she knows at arm’s length, from guys she meets in bars to her friends. Mikki is a settled-in-her-routines divorced mother of two, happily a mom, gift-shop owner, and co-parent with her ex-husband, Perry. And Ashley is a young, very-much-in-love bakery owner specializing in muffins who devotes herself to giving back to the community through a nonprofit that helps community members develop skills and find jobs. When the women meet drooling over a boardwalk storefront that none of them can afford on her own, a plan is hatched to divide the space in three, and a friendship—and business partnership—is born. An impromptu celebration on the beach at sunset with champagne becomes a weekly touchpoint to their lives as they learn more about each other and themselves. Their friendship blossoms as they help each other, offering support, hard truths, and loving backup. Author Mallery has created a delightful story of friendship between three women that also offers a variety of love stories as they fall in love, make mistakes, and figure out how to be the best—albeit still flawed—versions of themselves. The men are similarly flawed and human. While the story comes down clearly on the side of all-encompassing love, Mallery has struck a careful balance: There is just enough sex to be spicy, just enough swearing to be naughty, and just enough heartbreak to avoid being cloying.
A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism.Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-778-38608-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
The writing is inspired, the imaginative power near mystic, but some will wish for more plot.
This historical fever dream of a novel follows the flight of a servant girl through the Colonial American wilderness, red in tooth and claw.
As in her last novel, Matrix (2021), Groff’s imaginative journey into a distant time and place is powered by a thrumming engine of language and rhythm. “She had chosen to flee, and in so choosing, she had left behind her everything she had, her roof, her home, her country, her language, the only family she had ever known, the child Bess, who had been born into her care when she was herself a small child of four years or so, her innocence, her understanding of who she was, her dreams of who she might one day be if only she could survive this starving time." Those onrushing sentences will follow the girl, “sixteen or seventeen or perhaps eighteen years of age,” through the wilderness surrounding the desperate colony, driven by famine and plague into barbarism, through the territory of “the powhatan and pamunkey” to what she hopes will be “the settlements of frenchmen, canada,” a place she once saw pointed out on a map. The focus is on the terrors of survival, the exigencies of starvation, the challenges of locomotion, the miseries of a body wounded, infected, and pushed beyond its limit. What plot there is centers on learning the reason for her flight and how it will end, but the book must be read primarily for its sentences and the light it shines on the place of humans in the order of the world. Whether she is eating baby birds and stealing the fluff from the mother’s nest to line her boots, having a little tea party with her meager trove of possessions, temporarily living inside a tree trunk that comes with a pantry full of grubs (spiders prove less tasty), or finally coming to rest in a way neither she nor we can foresee, immersion in the girl’s experience provides a virtual vacation from civilization that readers may find deeply satisfying.
The writing is inspired, the imaginative power near mystic, but some will wish for more plot.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9780593418390
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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