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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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