A sophisticated adventure novel, restless to break out, yet comfortably couched in its genre.
Second-novelist Deb (The Point of Return, 2003), an author with great craft and potential, ventures into the militant-controlled territories of northeastern India.
Rummaging through the “morgue” of dead stories at the offices of the Calcutta newspaper where he has worked for the past ten years, reporter Amrit Singh fixes on a terrorist group’s chilling photograph of an abducted porn actress and two of her kidnappers. Hoping to emerge from “the stupor of the past seven years” at his paper and start a new life, Singh parlays the photo into an assignment from a European magazine to find the woman and learn what has become of her. With the long-distance help of Robiul, Singh’s mentor and an expert in the far-flung region of India where these terrorists operate, he works his way from cheap hotel to bus station to guard outpost and beyond, gradually submerging himself in a miasma of broken-down government and ramped-up insurgencies. The milieu, from beginning to end, has the disorder of a developing region plagued by Islamic fundamentalist violence and gang militarism, where one more disappearance is not necessarily big news. The major players are organizations with acronyms like MORLS and SLORC, but it’s the intimacy with the minor players—the aunt of the woman in the photograph, the tea salesman in the next hotel room—that gives this story its power. Deb’s style is straight-up occidental, forgoing the exotic aura of Arundhati Roy’s or Salman Rushdie’s tales. Of a small-time filmmaker in the region Singh says, “Even the barking of the dogs sounded foreign to him as he stumbled along in the cold, still half-asleep from the bus ride, so that the pine trees bleached white by the moonlight seemed like some blurred landscape from his disturbed dreams.”
A sophisticated adventure novel, restless to break out, yet comfortably couched in its genre.Pub Date: April 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-050155-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
