A moving, resonant collection of stories that honors its characters’ struggles and passions.
Albanian-American author Hakani presents a trio of heartfelt, interconnected tales about Albanian women.
The author’s first published book in English evocatively reinterprets the sentimental memories of an old family acquaintance and gifted storyteller. Among the women in her family, Hakani says, this elderly woman represented “the times we did not have a chance to live through, the times we looked back at in awe, admiration, and wonder.” The title novella, the most impressive of the group, uses rich, atmospheric detail to recount the lives of an Albanian mother and daughter-in-law, who deal with both the hardships and pleasures of an orthodox, pastoral life. In it, Mariana, a strikingly beautiful woman in the village of Kalasa, lives in an orange grove that she adores. But she finds her life becoming increasingly complicated when her son immigrates alone to America, leaving his own wife, Ana, behind to live with Mariana. After Ana is raped and bears the rapist’s child, the textured, nuanced story becomes a whirlwind of betrayal, misguided passion, obsession, and moral quandary. “Rina” tells of a young widow-turned-seductress who has alluring powers over the village men and of the tragedy and mystery of her death. The final story, “The Awakening,” follows an unlikely friendship between an orphaned, mentally retarded man and a local village woman, for whom he provides farming and caregiving help. Together, they transcend the cruelty of societal limitations to become lovers and life partners, much to the shock and chagrin of the critical villagers. Collectively, Hakani’s profound stories deliver an uplifting, cohesive reading experience filled with intrigue and melodrama, drawing on themes of feminine empowerment and resilience.
A moving, resonant collection of stories that honors its characters’ struggles and passions.Pub Date: April 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4787-5053-6
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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