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
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
