Brilliantly imagined. Artfully written. Superbly entertaining.
Khosi Saqr is an all-American boy, growing up in Butte, and a descendant of William Andrews Clark, the copper-mining king who put the Montana city on the world map.
Classifying Toutonghi’s (Red Weather, 2007) second novel as a coming-of-age tale sells this superb literary effort short. For example, Khosi may be a great-great-grandson of the copper king, but he also is the son of ne’er-do-well Akram Saqr, a Coptic Christian Egyptian who seduced Amy Clark, married her and presented her staid and prosperous parents with a grandson who looked “like a tiny Yasir Arafat.” Such is the wry humor spicing up Khosi’s story. When Khosi was a toddler, Akram departed for Egypt, leaving behind his family and significant gambling debts. Now in his early 20s, Khosi still lives with his mother in a run-down Victorian they call Loving Shambles, where she operates a catering business specializing in mid-Eastern cuisine and he contemplates the heroics of Evel Knievel. Thanks to the Internet, Khosi is an autodidact, more literate and sophisticated than his college-graduate contemporaries. He works as a guide at the historical Copper King Mansion, frequents the Berkeley Pit Yacht Club, a country music bar with a sawdust floor, and indulges his OCD compulsions. He also pines for his lifelong friend Natasha Mariner, recently engaged to a preppie. Such is Khosi’s life until his father returns from Egypt. After 20 years, he wants Amy to sign divorce papers. To everyone’s disbelief, Khosi decides to follow Akram back to Egypt. “I needed to track down this missing part of my story, this vanished and fugitive sector of my genealogy, this dim adumbration of my family’s lost past.” With writing both gently ironical and outright funny, the author’s extraordinary talent draws readers into the world of Butte and Cairo. More entertainingly, his characters are both believable and appealing, especially Khosi’s Egyptian aunts, their drill-sergeant housekeeper and the everyday people he meets.
Brilliantly imagined. Artfully written. Superbly entertaining.Pub Date: July 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-38215-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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