Although the rat’s identity is a given, Khashoggi overcomes potentially melodramatic material with deft, fast-paced...
Famed songbird dies under suspicious circumstances, leaving her daughter to search the past for clues.
Egyptian author Khashoggi (Mirage, 1996, etc.), now New York City–based, spins the engrossing tale of Karima, who, born the daughter of a chauffeur (for an English cotton pasha in Alexandria), becomes a revered singer in the Middle East. From childhood, Karima and Charles, the pasha’s only child, have loved each other. But when Charles comes of age, his parents refuse to let him marry Karima. The two meet secretly at night, however, in risky defiance of Karima’s brother Omar, a spy and flimflam man with a gambling problem. When Charles, after a bar fight, dies in a car crash, Karima discovers she’s pregnant. Omar beats her, but, seeing a chance to profit, arranges a marriage for her with Munir, an older businessman. When her daughter, Nadia, is born, the makeshift family turns real, and Karima’s musical gift blossoms into a professional career. But a theater fire during Egypt’s political upheaval of 1952 spells tragedy. Toddler Nadia is lost in the melee and eventually picked up by a French-Egyptian couple, Celine and her doctor husband Tarik. Too desperate for a child to alert the authorities, they take her to France and name her Gabrielle. Eventually, Tarik traces Gaby’s parentage but, for Celine’s sake, keeps it a secret. Karima, still pining for her lost daughter, continues performing to great acclaim even after Munir’s death from a heart attack. A powerful general, Hamza, befriends her, while her brother continues to leech money from her. Gabrielle, now a promising journalist, returns to Paris, where Celine is dying of cancer. Tarik can finally release the secret, and Gaby and Karima have a bittersweet reunion. Just as the two women are growing closer, and Gaby’s career is taking off, Karima dies, allegedly of an alcohol/barbiturate overdose. Since her mother was a strict teetotaler, Gaby smells a rat.
Although the rat’s identity is a given, Khashoggi overcomes potentially melodramatic material with deft, fast-paced storytelling and sympathetic characters. A winner.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-765-31236-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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