A middling story, then.
A Lebanese man disappears and his young son goes on a Telemachus-like quest to find him.
Born to a German mother and Lebanese father, German poet Jarawan opens his debut novel with a lively portrait of life in an immigrant neighborhood in Germany, its rooftops studded with satellite-TV antennas pointing in every direction. Young Samir’s father, Brahim el-Hourani, is up on the roof, aiming his new antenna with the help of friendly Arabic-speaking neighbors (“Too far to the left and you’ll get Italian TV,” warns one), then cheerfully explaining to his 7-year-old boy how satellites work in relation to earthly beings. Brahim is full of stories, particularly of the pungent, entrancing smell of the cedar trees of their native Lebanon. (The German title of the novel translates to “In the End, the Cedars Remain.”) Brahim is also resolutely apolitical, saying, “We all came here because we want peace, not war. It’s not about Christians and Muslims here.” But, one day, Brahim, showing slides of their homeland, lingers on an image showing him in a strange uniform, inciting questions from his son and worried demands from his wife that he destroy the thing. Instead, Brahim vanishes, and a decade later his son is in Lebanon looking for some trace of meaning: What did that troubling image mean? Why did his father go? Jarawan has just the right touch on some of the finer details, as when he writes in Samir’s voice that he remembers the date Nov. 22, 2000, not because it was when he lost his virginity but “because that’s the day Mother died." His depiction of a Lebanon once torn apart by civil war is also well-nuanced, though, once stripped of these elements, the novel is overall a more or less standard procedural: Someone disappears, someone goes on the hunt, assembles clues, hears from many voices, and solves the mystery. In all that Jarawan is a competent but not yet distinguished storyteller, and the plotline predictable.
A middling story, then.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64286-011-5
Page Count: 468
Publisher: World Editions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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
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