A powerful, if flawed, portrait of an honorable woman living amid dishonorable men.
When she's found with her murdered husband's blood on her hands, Zeba is almost strangled by his outraged cousin. She's rescued only to land in jail, accused of killing her husband.
Life in Chil Mahtab, an Afghan women’s prison, is an eye-opening experience for the shy mother of four. Once Zeba overcomes the shock of Kamal’s last moments and resigns herself to her new home, she discovers the incredible stories that have sent so many unfortunate women to its overcrowded cells. From runaway girls to betrayed mothers, each tells a tale of family honor used as a weapon against her, leaving prison a safe haven indeed. Zeba draws upon the spells her own mother, Gulnaz—who was often ostracized as a sorceress despite having a powerful spiritual leader for a father—taught her to help as many women as she can. Luckily, Zeba’s bother has hired Yusuef, a young lawyer, to represent her. Yet Zeba’s refusal to help in her own defense, her determination to face execution for a crime she may not have committed, maddens Yusuef and raises disturbing questions: what could have driven her to impale a hatchet in Kamal’s head? Could she be protecting the real killer? As Yusuef investigates, Kamal’s secrets come to light and Zeba’s courage begins to extend to surprising lengths. Hashimi (When the Moon is Low, 2015, etc.) mercilessly exposes the savage crimes against women committed in the name of honor. Yet Zeba’s fate lies caught between her presumed guilt and Kamal’s own dark secrets. As Hashimi slowly unveils the horror Zeba faced the day of his death, she masterfully builds tension, torquing sympathies to heart-wrenching levels. Unfortunately, the happy ending falls a bit flat, as the tale of human rights abuses fizzles out.
A powerful, if flawed, portrait of an honorable woman living amid dishonorable men.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-244968-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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