Steeped in Arabic culture and the Muslim faith, as well as sharply observant of immigrants’ intricate relationships to their...
Hassib’s sensitive, finely wrought debut probes the fault lines revealed in an Egyptian-American family after their eldest son kills his ex-girlfriend and himself.
Because the Al-Menshawys are Muslim immigrants to a small New Jersey town, they not only endure jaundiced scrutiny about where they went wrong with Hosaam, but ugly Internet shaming and whispers conflating a troubled teen’s actions with international terrorism. Hassib’s treatment of thoughtless prejudice is quietly scathing, but her real interest is how family members react to it. Mother Nagla is paralyzed by grief and guilt; almost a year after the murder-suicide, she is still relying on her mother, Ehsan, to run the house while she broods in her dead son’s attic room. She's appalled when her husband, Samir, a local doctor, decides that a memorial service for the girl Hosaam killed, daughter of their next-door neighbors, provides the perfect opportunity to rejoin the community. The novel takes place over the five days leading up to the service, but the characters’ memories range from the family’s arrival in 1985 through the fissures created by Hosaam’s act. Daughter Fatima is becoming more pious, which strikes her brother Khaled as providing one more reason for people to ostracize them. He feels his brother’s crime is still controlling the whole family’s behavior and thrashes around for ways to break free. Without minimizing the older generation’s faults—Samir is overbearing, Nagla passive-aggressive, Ehsan interfering and manipulative—Hassib makes palpable the bonds of love and loyalty that bind them and the children together in a situation that would test any family to its limits. The climax at the memorial service is as wrenching, awkward, and inconclusive as it would be in real life; an epilogue affirms that people survive even the most horrific traumas.
Steeped in Arabic culture and the Muslim faith, as well as sharply observant of immigrants’ intricate relationships to their adopted homelands, this exciting novel announces the arrival of a psychologically and socially astute new writer.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-42813-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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