On balance, this impressive debut novel will leave readers grateful for Dhar’s thoughtful command of her material and eager...
India’s recent past and her Hindu family’s own fragmented history complicate the new life sought in America by this dramatic first novel’s eponymous protagonist.
Indian-born Bijou lives and works in Washington, D.C., as a research resident at a prestigious medical institute. Traveling “home” to Calcutta to scatter the ashes of her recently deceased father Nitish (also an American resident) in the river running through his native city, she receives mixed welcomes from her indignant mother (who has never forgiven Nitish for his “desertion”—it’s complicated), her enthusiastically westernized younger sister and an extended family of relatives who both wish Bijou well and assume she’ll follow her father’s vagrant example yet again. A double structure of flashbacks immerses us periodically in Bijou’s own troubled Americanization (including the surrender of a possibly meaningful relationship with an admiring lover, to the shouldering of family burdens), and in Nitish’s story—that of a young intellectual participant in the “agrarian revolution” of the 1960s, who failed at commitments better kept by fellow idealistsf and who probably bears some responsibility for the sad fate of a beloved friend. When Bijou is drawn toward intimacy with Naveen, an ego-driven careerist who’s the son of her father’s oldest friend (and the possessor of secrets that trouble both their families’ memories), Bijou becomes obliged to confront issues which the well-meaning Nitish had never fully engaged. This is indeed something more than a conventional coming-of-age novel, thanks to Dhar’s sure-handed deployment of the impingement of 20th-century India’s political history on individuals struggling in its unpredictable currents. The connections aren’t made as swiftly as we might have hoped, but are there, in the story’s cumulative momentum, and they resonate strongly.
On balance, this impressive debut novel will leave readers grateful for Dhar’s thoughtful command of her material and eager to see her extend her range still further.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-55101-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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
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
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