An action-packed story with good intentions but too many loose ends.
A woman on a business trip in Sri Lanka survives a tsunami only to discover the horrors that women can face after a natural disaster in this ambitious debut novel.
On Christmas morning, Lola awakens in her Sri Lankan hotel room to find her world turned upside down—literally. Water rises as she finds her female co-worker, Shey, and they escape the hotel in the wake of a tsunami. They scramble up a tree only to be harassed by a group of men, and they find shelter on the roof of the hotel. In the aftermath, they speculate about what happened to another co-worker, Nick, who Lola says deserved to die, and Ama, a factory worker whom they’re desperate to find. A monk leads the pair to a temple with dozens of others, where they receive water and meet Dr. Brent Rogers, a charming man from Washington, D.C., who wants to help. But the longer they stay at the temple, the less safe Lola feels. Her boss, Richard, appears unharmed in an SUV and drives them all back to the factory, where Lola was assigned to buy fabric. Richard assumes that Lola and Nick are lovers, but Lola denies this, telling him that Nick had raped Ama and that she aims to help Ama prove it. As the days wear on, Shey takes a job at the camp and Lola continues to search for Nick and Ama, eventually finding out a secret. The story unfolds rapidly, propelled along by the emergencies at hand. However, its excessive detail quickly overwhelms the plot. The most distracting element is the two-dimensional, superficial Lola; at one point, for example, she risks her and Shey’s lives in an attempt to grab her own expensive watch from debris. Overall, the story mainly relates her actions instead of her emotions. The Nick-and-Ama plot could have been compelling, but the tsunami and the chaos that follows make it cumbersome. Although the novel apparently aims to show how women lack protection in refugee camps, it makes very little of a scene of nonconsensual sex between Dr. Rogers and Lola. The book’s saving grace, though, is its strong conclusion, which weaves Shey’s story into a satisfying ending.
An action-packed story with good intentions but too many loose ends.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5176-1982-4
Page Count: 186
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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