Atta writes lyrically and eloquently about ordinary life.
Atta (Everything Good Will Come, 2007) focuses on two women fighting against sexual harassment and trying to make a meaningful life in Nigeria.
Rose and Tolani (the novel’s narrator) share both a friendship and a workplace—a bank in Lagos—but at the beginning of the novel, Rose is sacked for refusing the advances of the repulsive Mr. Salako, a senior manager. While Rose is somewhat relieved to be out of an awkward situation, she’s mortified when Tolani is named to her position—and Tolani also finds herself harassed by the relentless Salako. Rose is fundamentally unhappy being Nigerian and instead wishes “she had been born in Czechoslovakia because the name sounded sophisticated.” Besides Salako, Tolani has problems with her lover Sanwo, who can’t quite commit either to a job or to her. She wants to give him an ultimatum that she hopes will result in marriage, but she’s fearful of the possible consequences because she finds it hard to imagine her life without him. Meanwhile, the increasingly desperate Rose takes up with OC, recently returned from a successful yet mysterious business deal in America. OC’s sleaziness makes Tolani uneasy, and her friendship with Rose—like her relationship with Sanwo—begins to falter. Tolani’s intuitions about OC turn out to be correct, for he’s a drug dealer who wants to use them both as mules to transport heroin in condoms to the States. Neither Rose nor Tolani can quite get the hang of swallowing the undigestible packages, and Tolani eventually decides on moral grounds that she doesn’t want to be exploited in this way. In increasingly distressed financial condition, Rose winds up being OC’s drug courier but dies when the package “explodes” inside her. By the end of the narrative, Tolani, who comes from a small Yoruba village, decides that life in Lagos is too wretched and corrupt, so she returns home to her mother, looking to start afresh—and include Sanwo in her future.
Atta writes lyrically and eloquently about ordinary life.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56656-833-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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 tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
