A sharply drawn protagonist gives this novel power and zest.
Making an appealing debut, Canadian lawyer Patel draws on her experiences at a nongovernmental organization in India to follow the fortunes of Justice For All, a financially strapped human rights agency, where underpaid lawyers toil mightily to represent the poor of Mumbai.
Cynical, street-smart Rakhi is the agency’s 23-year-old office assistant whose menial tasks include taking care of a changing cast of naïve interns, who, she remarks, “come here wanting to fix India and leave after two stomach bugs, whining about how much they miss clean air and something they call almond milk.” Rakhi was hired by the agency’s director, Gauri, who first met her at a girls’ school where she had been remanded after living on the streets for 5 years—an experience that Patel recounts in gritty detail. Learning about Rakhi’s childhood—abandonment, hunger, physical harm—Gauri was astonished by the girl’s fierce spirit and intelligence: “Every door had been slammed in your face,” she tells Rakhi, “and yet there you were, still surviving.” When Rakhi turns 18, Gauri gives her a job that, she thinks, will grant the girl “another chance at life”; but for Rakhi, working for Gauri seems, instead, like another incarceration. Paid a pittance, she lives in a slum of “open sewers, monsoon floods,” and teeming “multilevel hutments”; and furthermore, Gauri monitors her every move. Rakhi’s longing for a different future and Gauri’s desperate effort to keep her agency afloat make them vulnerable to two characters—vivid though stereotypical—who seem to offer an answer to their dreams: a well-connected Canadian intern bound for Harvard’s Kennedy School who takes an outsized interest in Rakhi’s life; and a fading Bollywood star, hoping to revive her career, who promises to lure big donors in exchange for becoming the “public face” of the NGO.
A sharply drawn protagonist gives this novel power and zest.Pub Date: April 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-49950-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.
An undergraduate at Brown University unearths the buried history of a Latine artist.
As in her bestselling debut, Olga Dies Dreaming (2022), Gonzalez shrewdly anatomizes racial and class hierarchies. Her bifurcated novel begins at a posh art-world party in 1985 as the title character, a Cuban American land and body artist, garners recognition that threatens the ego of her older, more famous husband, white minimalist sculptor Jack Martin. The story then shifts to Raquel Toro, whose working-class, Puerto Rican background makes her feel out of place among the “Art History Girls” who easily chat with professors and vacation in Europe. Nonetheless, in the spring of 1998, Raquel wins a prestigious summer fellowship at the Rhode Island School of Design, and her faculty adviser is enthusiastic about her thesis on Jack Martin, even if she’s not. Soon she’s enjoying the attentions of Nick Fitzsimmons, a well-connected, upper-crust senior. As Raquel’s story progresses, Anita’s first-person narrative acquires a supernatural twist following the night she falls from the window of their apartment —“jumped? or, could it be, pushed?”—but it’s grimly realistic in its exploration of her toxic relationship with Jack. (A dedication, “In memory of Ana,” flags the notorious case of sculptor Carl Andre, tried and acquitted for the murder of his wife, artist Ana Mendieta.) Raquel’s affair with Nick mirrors that unequal dynamic when she adapts her schedule and appearance to his whims, neglecting her friends and her family in Brooklyn. Gonzalez, herself a Brown graduate, brilliantly captures the daily slights endured by someone perceived as Other, from microaggressions (Raquel’s adviser refers to her as “Mexican”) to brutally racist behavior by the Art History Girls. While a vividly rendered supporting cast urges Raquel to be true to herself and her roots, her research on Martin leads to Anita’s art and the realization that she belongs to a tradition that’s been erased from mainstream art history.
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781250786210
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.
An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel.
As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, “What was it all for?…Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?” But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a “training school for girls” and laundry business, disrupts Furlong’s sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross’ convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong’s emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5874-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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