This book has the architecture of a great novel but falls short in the execution. A writer worth watching.
The lead-up to and aftermath of a commercial jet crash are seen from the perspectives of many people whose lives the tragedy touches.
Kistulentz's debut novel begins at the Salt Lake City airport on New Year’s Eve 2000—“the last day of the last year when we still felt safe”—with an unhappy 48-year-old airline mechanic who makes a mistake in the preflight check of a 727, preoccupied with getting home to his wife to celebrate New Year’s Eve. Though the crash won't actually occur until the following afternoon, its utter devastation is described in this chapter, “soot and ash and oozing plastic and blood spatter, the implied presence of human remains.” This choice trades in some of the suspense of the situation for a heart-wrenching certainty about the outcome for several of the characters, of which there are many, though some only get a chapter or two—for example, a kid who films the crash, various airport employees, members of the airline’s Adam and Eve teams who go out to notify the next of kin. The central cast member among the passengers is Mary Beth Blumenthal, a single mother who's left her 6-year-old son home in Texas with a co-worker so she and her boss can spend the weekend together in a Salt Lake City hotel, though she's still wondering why he chose Utah. Her brother, a Washington, D.C.–based television pundit named Richard MacMurray, who presumably will be inheriting her orphaned son, is followed even more closely than Mary Beth, including very detailed chapters on his career options and love life, including even the post-breakup sexual adventures of his ex-girlfriend. These chapters seem marginal to the main concerns of the book and, once the crash has occurred, verge on tastelessness. Though Kistulentz confidently sets up and populates the panorama of the book's title, there’s a paint-by-numbers quality to his depiction of his characters’ emotions that keeps the reader at arm’s length when we should be most swept up.
This book has the architecture of a great novel but falls short in the execution. A writer worth watching.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55176-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
A luminous collection that mines the mundane as cannily as the fantastic and extraterrestrial.
From the author of A Wrinkle in Time, 18 gemlike stories ranging from the small heartbreaks of childhood to the discovery of life on a new planet
In these stories, some previously published and others appearing for the first time in this collection, L’Engle explores family dynamics, loneliness, and the pains of growing up. In “Summer Camp,” children show a stunning capacity for cruelty, as when one writes an imploring letter to a lost friend only to witness that friend mocking the letter in front of their bunkmates; in “Madame, Or...” a brother finds his sister at a finishing school with a sordid underbelly and is unable to convince her to leave. L’Engle employs rhythm and repetition to great effect in multiple stories—the same gray cat seems to appear in “Gilberte Must Play Bach” and “Madame, Or...”—and sometimes even in the language of a single sentence: “The piano stood in the lamplight, lamplight shining through burnt shades, red candles in the silver candlesticks...red wax drippings on the base of the candlesticks.” Occasionally, emotional undertones flow over, as in the protagonist’s somewhat saccharine goodbye to her Southern home in “White in the Moon the Long Road Lies.” Overall, though, the stories seem to peer at strong emotions from the corner of the eye, and humor dances in and out of the tales. “A Foreign Agent” sees a mother and daughter in battle over the daughter’s glasses, which have come to represent the bridge between childhood and adulthood when the mother’s literary agent begins to pursue the daughter. On another planet, a higher life form makes a joke via code: The visitors will be “quartered—housed, that is, of course, not drawn and quartered.” While there is levity, many of these stories end with characters undecided, straddling a nostalgic past and an unsettled future. Although written largely throughout the 1940s and '50s, L’Engle’s lucid explorations of relationships make her writing equally accessible today.
A luminous collection that mines the mundane as cannily as the fantastic and extraterrestrial.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1782-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
A well-crafted structure and a troubled but engaging narrator power this moving story of Syrian refugees.
The human stories behind news images of Syrian war refugees emerge in a novel both touching and terrifying.
Lefteri (A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible, 2011) is the child of refugees, raised in London after her parents fled Cyprus in the 1970s. This novel’s characters are fleeing a different war, the current, devastating civil war in Syria. Politics are barely mentioned in the book, though—when war has destroyed your home and livelihood, blinded your wife and killed your young son, the reasons for that war lose their meaning. The novel follows Nuri and Afra Ibrahim as they escape from Aleppo and make the perilous journey to Britain after their son, Sami, dies. Nuri narrates the book; its chapters alternate gracefully among the golden prewar past, the struggle to gain legal refugee status in England in the present, and the journey in between, a long nightmare of chaotically crowded refugee camps, life-threatening sea crossings, and smugglers eager to exploit them. In Aleppo, Afra was an artist; Nuri was the titular beekeeper, a job he loved, in business with his cousin and dearest friend, Mustafa. The war leaves Nuri and Afra no choice but to leave, but her blindness and emotional trauma mean that he must be her caretaker as well as grappling with the bewildering navigation to another country. Along the way, he also becomes the guardian of Mohammed, a lost boy about the same age as Sami. Lefteri says in her author’s note that the book was inspired by her volunteer work in a refugee camp in Athens, and Nuri’s story rings with authenticity, from the vast, impersonal cruelties of war to the tiny kindnesses that help people survive it. Nuri wants to be the strong one, but Lefteri subtly, slowly shows the reader how deep his wounds are as well.
A well-crafted structure and a troubled but engaging narrator power this moving story of Syrian refugees.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984821-21-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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