by Troy Hill ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 16, 2012
An unsettling and ultimately memorable modern-day hybrid of religious fiction and Romeo and Juliet.
In Hill’s debut novel, a Christian girl and a Muslim boy face some exceptional obstacles on their road to high school romance.
When Dr. Najib Al-Deayea decides to move his family from a small Michigan city to a town 90 minutes from Atlanta, his young son Aazim accepts the change philosophically (“He believed that his situation must be Allah’s way of testing him and shaping him into a stronger man”). He’s an outcast at first, until he meets Dee, the daughter of his father’s new partner and as devout a Christian as Aazim is a Muslim. The two are wary of each other, but as the bullying Aazim experiences grows more severe, Dee is pushed by both her outraged father and her own developing conscience to stand up for Aazim. She begins to like him. The two are equally passionate students in Bible class, but it’s only when Aazim teaches himself the new language of Facebook (and begins to condition his body with martial arts) that the two really connect and fall for each other. “This will not be easy,” Aazim tells Dee, but although they meet with some good-natured resistance from their parents, the real problem isn’t domestic; it’s divine. Just as their relationship is beginning to blossom, the rapture happens. Dee is assumed into heaven, and Aazim is left back on Earth. Hill’s narrative, which had to this point been extremely sensitive and gentle, becomes at once much funnier and much more serious: Dee discovers that she can still keep in touch with Aazim through Facebook (hilariously, the first thing she does when she finds herself in heaven is reach for her cellphone), and in the book’s second half, the two exchange increasingly agonized messages that bring their one love and their two faiths into direct conflict, since as long as Aazim remains true to Islam, they can never be together. The book’s ending is starkly fundamentalist Christian in its assertions, and it won’t be just Muslim readers who might find the story’s final twist shocking or even offensive.
An unsettling and ultimately memorable modern-day hybrid of religious fiction and Romeo and Juliet.Pub Date: May 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475156065
Page Count: 122
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
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Pulitzer Prize Winner
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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by Tommy Orange ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 27, 2024
A searing study of the consequences of a genocide.
A lyrical, multigenerational exploration of Native American oppression.
Orange’s second novel is partly a sequel to his acclaimed 2018 debut, There There—its second half centers on members of the Red Feather family after the events of the first book. But Orange moves the story back as well as forward. He rewinds to 1864’s Sand Creek Massacre, in which Natives were killed or displaced by the U.S. Army. One survivor (and Red Feather family ancestor), Jude Star, is a mute man imprisoned and sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School, one of several institutions designed to strip Native Americans of their history and folklore. As Orange tracks the generations that follow, he suggests that such schools did their jobs well, but imperfectly—essential traces of Native heritage endure despite decades of murder, poverty, and addiction. That theme crystallizes as the story shifts to 2018, depicting Orvil Red Feather’s struggles after he was shot at a powwow in Oakland, California. His path is perilous, especially thanks to a school friend with easy access to addictive pain medications. But Orvil doesn’t quite lose his grip on history, whether that’s through stories of his mother participating in the 19-month Native American occupation of Alcatraz from 1969 to 1971, or cowboys-and-Indians lore he contemplates while playing Red Dead Redemption 2. “Everyone only thinks we’re from the past, but then we’re here, but they don’t know we’re still here,” as Orvil’s brother Lony puts it. Orange is gifted at elevating his characters without romanticizing them, and though the cast is smaller than in There There, the sense of history is deeper. And the timbre of individual voices is richer, from Orvil’s streetwise patter to the officiousness of Carlisle founder Richard Henry Pratt, determined to send “the vanishing race off into final captivity before disappearing into history forever.” He failed, but this is a powerful indictment of his—and America’s—efforts.
A searing study of the consequences of a genocide.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780593318256
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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