A third novel from the Iranian-born Rachlin (Foreigner, 1978; Married to a Stranger, 1983) offers an unpretentious but affecting portrait of the irreconcilable conflict between the familiar and the foreign. With the long Iran-Iraq war over, Karim Sahary thinks its safe to take his American wife, Jennifer, and their six-year-old son, Darius, to Teheran to see his family. The year is 1989, and since Americans are still the enemy, the couple uses a circuitous travel route, leaving their passports in Istanbul for safekeeping. The strictures on women imposed by the Khomeini revolution are also still rigorously enforced. And while these political considerations play a role in the events of that summer, it is more the disparate emotional reactions of Karim and Jennifer that will determine the outcome of the visit. Karim, a professor of urban planning, and Jennifer, a graphics designer, met and married during college in Ohio, where they now live. Karim, prevented by the war from seeing his family, has not only felt increasingly alienated from American society but, as an Iranian, has been subject to hostile prejudice. Now, finally back home, he's cheered by seeing his family and excited by the professional challenges he finds in the country. Jennifer, though, is troubled by the pervasive secret police, the narrow lives of the women she meets, her mother-in-law's religiosity, and, most importantly, by Karim's increasing coolness and rejection of their stateside life. When the ailing Darius disappears with his grandmother to the holy city of Qom, Jennifer sets out to find her son, deciding along the way that it's time for the two of them to return homenot an easy decision, as she soon learns. A perceptive account, in polished prose, not only of cultural difference but of conditions in a society still disturbingly alien- -and hostile to our own.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-87286-304-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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