An entertaining if occasionally cheesy love story in the rich historical setting of strife-torn Bangladesh.
Two generations of Bengalis weather religious tensions, political upheaval, and star-crossed love in this fizzy romance.
He’s Bakhtiar Khan, a Muslim physics student in Dhaka, Bangladesh; she’s Pooja Roy Chowdhury, a Hindu philosophy student in Kolkota, India. They meet cute in a Bangkok hotel and soon realize they are soulmates. Pooja’s prejudiced grandmother hates the idea of her marrying a Muslim and starts fasting to protest the wedding but relents when Pooja counters with her own fast. The interfaith marriage goes swimmingly, and the couple moves to Florida. They both become professors, and the novel’s focus shifts to their son, Satya, a prodigy who, at age 7, speaks six languages, has a physics lab in his bedroom, and relentlessly fact-checks fairy tales. At 17, he gets his math Ph.D. and is offered a position as CEO of a tech startup, but he opts instead for a grander vision: establishing a retirement home for indigent old folks back in Bangladesh with a school attached for poor kids, all financed by produce fields and a fish pond. Satya’s meticulous plan for the project, called Shanti Kunja, goes great, and love softens his austere intellect. He friendzones his besotted assistant, Roma, but is smitten himself by fetching journalist Aratrika. Passion erupts when Satya and Aratrika are drenched in a downpour, and Aratrika demands that Satya help remove her bra—the clasp is stuck—so she can change into dry clothes. Then turmoil breaks out with the (real-life) overthrow of Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in a 2024 uprising led by Islamic fundamentalists, and violence threatens to undo the new relationship and sink Shanti Kunja. Mohit’s yarn is an energetic take on Bengali-style romance, reigned over by matriarchs and gal-pal matchmakers, prodded along by whirlwind courtships and happenstances that fling lovers into each other’s arms, and written in throbbing, heartfelt prose (“The moment I saw you, my soul was trapped in your eyes”). Threading through is an earnest, philosophically complex critique of organized religions— “Religion is the progression of early sorcerer’s magic,” says Satya, a stance that puts him dangerously at odds with mullahs—and a plea for tolerance and freedom of thought. The result is a somewhat contrived but still affecting story of people pushing past antagonistic faiths to find love.
An entertaining if occasionally cheesy love story in the rich historical setting of strife-torn Bangladesh.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9798344031187
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A wallowing, emotionally wrenching family drama that leaves little time for romance.
Two people with bad luck in relationships find each other through a popular Reddit thread.
Emma Grant and her best friend, Maddy, are travel nurses, working at hospitals for three-month stints while they see the country. Just a few weeks before they’re set to move to Hawaii, Emma reads a popular “Am I the Asshole” Reddit thread from a Minnesota man who thinks he’s cursed—women he dates find their soulmates after breaking up with him, and the latest one found true love with his best friend! Emma has had a similar experience, which inspires her to DM the man and commiserate. She’s delighted by her witty, lively interactions with software engineer Justin Dahl, and is intrigued when he suggests that if they date each other, maybe they’ll each find their soulmate afterward. Emma upends the Hawaii plan and convinces Maddy to move to Minneapolis for the summer so she can meet Justin in person. The overly complex setup brings Emma and Justin together and the two hit it off, with Justin immediately falling head over heels for Emma. Jimenez then pivots to creating romantic roadblocks and melodramatic subplots centering on each character’s family of origin. Justin’s mother is about to serve six years in prison for embezzlement, which means Justin must move back home to care for his three much younger siblings. Emma was traumatized by her own mother for much of her childhood, left to fend for herself and eventually abandoned in the foster system. When her mother shows up in Minnesota, Emma must face her traumatic childhood and admit that she has prioritized her mother’s well-being over her own. There is little time devoted to Emma’s painful efforts to heal herself enough to accept Justin’s love, which leaves the novel feeling unsatisfying.
A wallowing, emotionally wrenching family drama that leaves little time for romance.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781538704431
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Forever
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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