A welcome glimpse into a much-misunderstood culture suffers from newcomer Haji’s tendencies toward long-winded...
In Haji’s debut novel, an Indo-Pakistani Muslim tries to balance her family’s traditional values and her independent nature.
As the story begins, adult Saira suffers a nightmare in which “twin plumes of smoke rise” above a destroyed city and a woman is shot to death. Awake, Saira remembers growing up in California with her older sister Ameena and their moderately conservative Muslim parents. Ameena is the beauty, Saira the brains. In 1983, 14-year-old Saira makes a life-changing trip to Pakistan to attend a family wedding alone because her mother and sister refuse to attend. On the way to Pakistan she learns her mother’s family secret: Saira’s grandfather left Saira’s beautiful but unsophisticated grandmother, with whom he had an arranged marriage, for a young British woman, his soul mate with whom he had three children. On her way home from Pakistan, Saira stays in London with her paternal uncle’s family and learns another secret from her cousin Mohsin—their paternal grandfather’s idealistic devotion to Gandhi caused him to neglect his family. Back in California, while Ameena happily agrees to an arranged marriage, Saira becomes a mildly rebellious teen, appearing in a play without her parents’ knowledge. Then she goes to college, where she experiments with drinking, drugs and sex, including having a brief affair with a visiting journalist/scholar. After a break with her family that Haji, herself an Indo-Pakistani, coyly avoids explaining, Saira begins traveling the world as a journalist with now openly gay Mohsin, a photographer. She reunites with her family when her mother is dying. Ameena, who has become seriously devout, is happily married with an adorable daughter. Saira takes her widowed father back to India, where he remarries and begins to work at the clinic his father founded years earlier. After Ameena, who has begun to wear a hijab, is shot to death in the aftermath of 9/11, Saira rushes home to sort out her priorities.
A welcome glimpse into a much-misunderstood culture suffers from newcomer Haji’s tendencies toward long-winded religious/philosophic musing.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-149385-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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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