An earnest but formulaic story of religious radicalization and its effects.
Five lives are profoundly transformed by a terrorist attack on a Brussels airport in Hamilton’s novel.
Ibrahim’s family departs Morocco for Brussels in 1998 in search of a better life, but full integration into Belgian life proves elusive. His family settles into Mollenbeek, a hardscrabble neighborhood. Ibrahim is indifferent to his Muslim heritage and, like many teens, is infatuated with girls, money, and football; he also engages in casual drug use. After a botched armed robbery attempt, Ibrahim is sentenced to 10 years in prison, and during the first year he undergoes a radical transformation into a devout Muslim under the tutelage of Mohamed, an Algerian fellow prisoner. Eventually, he enthusiastically joins the Islamic State group and becomes their foot soldier in Syria and Iraq, finally returning to Europe. Hamilton powerfully captures his protagonist’s anger: “Dark revenge was in Ibrahim’s heart. Revenge against the West that bombed and gassed his brothers and Arab children, while their own children slept safely in ignorance of the daily terror inflicted against the Caliphate.” After participating in successful attacks on Paris, he plans a major assault on an airport, while staying a step ahead of intelligence services. The author explores the ramifications of terrorism by chronicling the overlapping lives of five people whose lives are waylaid by it: Nena, a DJ from Antwerp; Philippe, a philandering restauranteur; Mark, an elite British soldier; Roxy, a diving instructor engaged to a Turkish oligarch; and Tom and Meena, both IT professionals and colleagues—the former meek and incompetent, the latter ruthlessly ambitious. However, the resulting scope of the narrative is simply too grand, and the proliferation of subplots becomes a distraction; readers may wish that that author had devoted more time to more deeply developing a pared-down cast of characters. Moreover, this is an overly familiar tale at its core, and one that’s been told so many times that it feels like the rehearsal of a formula. For all its undeniable intelligence, this novel may fail to sustain readers’ attention to the end.
An earnest but formulaic story of religious radicalization and its effects.Pub Date: April 30, 2023
ISBN: 978-0957489462
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Cambria Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.
On the isle of Capri, Helen Lingate seeks revenge on the people responsible for her mother’s death 30 years earlier—her own family.
When Sarah Lingate fell to her death on Capri in 1992, she left behind a 3-year-old daughter, Helen, and a legacy as a gifted playwright; her favorite necklace of golden snakes was lost to the sea. Thirty years later, Helen, chafing at the restrictions she’s grown up under as a member of the old-money Lingate family, hatches a plan with her uncle Marcus’ assistant, Lorna Moreno, to blackmail her uncle and her father with that same necklace, which mysteriously entered her possession a few months before. The novel begins on Capri just after Lorna disappears, and then traces her steps from 36 hours earlier. Interweaving chapters from the points of view of Helen, Lorna, and Sarah—as well as, later, a few others—we learn how Sarah gradually became stifled by the constant pressure of keeping up appearances until she became inspired to write a play, Saltwater, that was a not-so-thinly veiled tell-all revealing dark Lingate family secrets. It was shortly after this that she fell to her death. The loss of her mother has come to define Helen’s life, and if she can use the necklace as leverage to escape her family, and maybe learn the truth along the way, she’ll take the risk. Lorna’s motives are both murkier and more straightforward—she’s never had money, and she’s got a chip on her shoulder about it, so splitting 10 million euros with Helen sounds like a way to discard her past and start fresh. These strong, conniving women drive the drama and the narrative, and they are captivating enough that as twist after twist begins to unfurl, the novel still feels character-driven. The end—well, the end shocks. And it’s well earned. By the time the sun sets on the gorgeous excess and rugged coast of Capri, lives will have been destroyed.
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593875551
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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