Ahmed swings for the fences in this luminously intelligent, culturally magisterial debut.
A Muslim Indian family, splintered by forces from within and without, attempts to reconnect over one fateful week in San Francisco.
"Oh, Grandmother, you’re not asleep yet. The voices from the kitchen are no lullaby. Your daughters are fighting, and you blame yourself. There must have been something you could have done, before the rifts widened to such chasms." Ahmed's complex, ambitious debut is narrated by a fetus who—like his literary cousin in Ian McEwan's Nutshell—has narrative art to spare. Having just emerged from his mother's lifeless body in the delivery room, he unfolds a tragedy of classic proportions, fluently incorporating the poetry of Wordsworth, Keats, and the Quran and including masterful descriptions of the skies of San Francisco, of Muslim ritual, of LGBTQ+ protests, of Indian cooking and theater, of the volunteer organizations of then–District Attorney Kamala Harris and presidential candidates Howard Dean and Barack Obama. The story unfolds in a confusing manner, with some intent to mislead, but is essentially this: Seema, estranged from her family in India and uprooted to the U.S. when she came out as queer decades ago, briefly married Bill, a Black man. After their rancorous breakup, one instance of farewell sex led to the conception of Ishraaq (the name his mother chooses after learning he's a boy). As Ishraaq's due date draws near, Seema's mother, Nafeesa, comes from Chennai, though she is dying of cancer. Younger sister Tahera, a devout Muslim in hijab and jilbab, a mother of two and an OB/GYN, also arrives from her home in Irvine, Texas—though she is poisonously jealous of her sister and disgusted by her gay friends. Every difficulty and heartbreak takes its place alongside many others in this painful story shaped by both Islamophobia and homophobia.
Ahmed swings for the fences in this luminously intelligent, culturally magisterial debut.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64009-404-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
In this tender and capacious story, love and tragedy mingle along the river and into the world.
The Red River of the North cuts a vivid track through the hardscrabble lives that anchor Erdrich’s surpassing North Dakota fiction.
This deft, almost winsome novel begins at night, with Crystal Frechette, a trucker. She’s hauling sugar beets and wearing “a lucky hat knitted by her daughter,” Kismet Poe. Her headlights are “peacefully cutting radiant holes in the blackness” when she glimpses a mountain lion vault across the road. It’s a sign, but of what? Kismet, finishing high school, is edgy, furious, and bored. Both Gary Geist, her school’s quarterback, and Hugo Dumach, a nerdy home-schooler, fixate on her as the angel destined to slay their wildly divergent demons. This nutty love triangle kickstarts the plot; Kismet, in a futile stab at avoiding teen marriage, slips from a bridge into the cold Red River, floating downstream until she’s rescued. But true love here is the kind between mother and daughter. This pair, beset by the 2008 economic meltdown, proves expert in “getting trapped but at least not giving up.” Around them, a recent, communal catastrophe on the frozen river stays murky through three-quarters of the story. In counterpoint, the town’s daffy book club dissects Eat Pray Love and The Road, each session blooming into comic set pieces. Erdrich reaches for some of her fictional staples: a waitressing gig, multiple viewpoints, and, always, mixed-heritage Native people trying to grasp and transmit that heritage. Her writing feels both effortless and wise. She notes a boy’s “shy armpits” and how a soundproofed house can feel “inhuman, maybe even violent.” Even if a minor character, the Catholic priest, bogs down in caricature, Erdrich has few equals in braiding landscape and sky into the marrow of her characters. Her poet’s origins are in full force as she folds in the sickening damage of fracking and pesticide-dependent agriculture, right alongside the sprouts of resistance.
In this tender and capacious story, love and tragedy mingle along the river and into the world.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780063277052
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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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