A stirring, engrossing tale.
The story of a fateful night.
On December 7, 1935, two wealthy Tunisian families were torn apart when a young wife and mother was accused of adultery. In Tunisian novelist Ghenim’s captivating narrative, translated by Faiza and McNeill, 11 of the characters involved recall an event that has continued to haunt them for decades, revealing in their confessions and testimonies a tangled web of lies, suspicions, and betrayals, as well as a society pervaded by homophobia, classism, antisemitism, and racism. French colonialism sparked social unrest and political upheaval. Medicine was undermined by superstition; jinns, demons, and ghouls abounded; and the evil eye, it was believed, could be diverted by a Black child’s face. In a rabidly patriarchal society, the accused woman, Zbaida Rassaa, grew up in a relatively progressive family. Rare among Tunisian women, she and her sisters attended a French school, and to supplement their education, their father hired a young man to tutor them in Arabic and the Quran. That tutor, Tahar Haddad, a social reformer, wrote a book criticizing women’s oppression under Islamic law and advocating for women’s rights—a book that proved dangerously incendiary. For years, Zbaida and Tahar had been in love, but when he dared to ask for her hand, her father summarily married her off to Mohsen Ennaifer, the son of a staunchly conservative patriarch. “There’s nothing in this life more harmful to women than trying to imitate men,” Mohsen’s father declared about the folly of educating women. Although the urbane, cosmopolitan Mohsen shared Zbaida’s pleasure in theater and music, her feelings for Tahar were not quashed by marriage and motherhood. But were they ever lovers? Ghenim keeps the reader guessing, as she does her characters, with passion and anguish, disclosing devastating secrets of lives maliciously destroyed.
A stirring, engrossing tale.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798889660507
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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