A promising but padded work that’s hampered by its slow pace.
A visit from Benito Mussolini upends the lives of an anti-Fascist family in el Moncef’s novella set in 1930s Libya.
There’s nothing more important to the Khaldoon family than loyalty. Indeed, the Italian occupation of their native Benghazi means that loyalty is more important than ever, but it’s frequently put to the test. According to their mother’s wishes, 9-year-old Mariam Khaldoon and her sister, Zaynab, attend a so-called “Mussolini school” to further their secular education. Their merchant father, a committed anti-Fascist, regards their attendance at the school as a capitulation to the occupiers. After accidentally splitting her lip on a washboard, Mariam returns from the infirmary and encounters Markunda, a Tuareg woman who insists on reading her fortune: “The reading did not last more than ten or fifteen minutes,” Mariam recalls years later, “and yet Markunda was able to put her finger on some of the most crucial things my inner world revolved around: the inexplicable sensitivities; the middle-of-the-night onslaughts of unruly ideas and unrelenting mental energy.” Markunda predicts that Mariam will do marvelous things in the future, but the youngster has no idea just what they will entail. The answer arrives a few years later when Mussolini himself visits Benghazi. Mariam and Zaynab are chosen among all the girls to welcome Il Duce to their school—a move that their father interprets as a deliberate effort to shame him for his work to fund the resistance against Fascist rule. Will Mariam betray her loyalty to her father, her family, and her country by doing what the teachers at her school tell her to do?
El Moncef’s prose is elegant and evocative; he captures not only the street life of Benghazi, but the imaginative mind of his narrator Mariam: “I caught myself playing a game: narrowing my eyes and tilting my head slightly, visualizing the wide neoclassical building at the end of the long, slate-cobbled alley as one of the messy watercolors I would paint with Mother’s awkward help.” The novella (which, at fewer than 70 pages, feels very much like a short story) seems overpacked; in addition to a list of characters and unnecessary maps of Benghazi and the Khaldoon household, there’s a 15-page introductory note by Mari Ruti, a professor of critical theory and gender and sexuality studies at the University of Toronto. Additionally, the plot’s main action is nested within two separate frame narratives. All of these layers have the unintentional effect of drawing the reader’s attention to how slight and uneventful the narrative ultimately is. A great deal of text is expended on the incident of Mariam injuring her lip, for example, even though it reveals very little regarding the central conflicts of the story. However, the setting is compelling and well rendered, and the relationship between Mariam and her father is worthy of exploration. Readers will likely wish that they didn’t have to wade through all of the additional, unneeded material to get to it.
A promising but padded work that’s hampered by its slow pace.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2022
ISBN: 9782954996530
Page Count: 106
Publisher: Penelope Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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