An affecting, observant rendering of the immigrant experience in contemporary America.
A Nigerian family living in Florida bears deep, abiding, and distressing scars from a long-ago but devastating civil war in their native land.
The 2014 kidnapping of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls by Islamic terrorists unhinges an already tightly wound Florida attorney named Fidelis Ewerike, a Nigerian émigré and father of two who, upon hearing of the kidnapping, decides to place his 16-year-old daughter, Amara, in her bedroom under lock and key. The mass kidnapping reawakens in Fidelis the traumas he sustained as a soldier and prisoner of war in the late-1960s Biafran War, during which his younger sister, Ugochi, went missing. Amara’s uncanny resemblance to Ugochi magnifies Fidelis’ mad zeal to protect her from faraway peril. (“He believed that if his sister…could be stolen, could disappear into thin air, then the same fate could befall his daughter. Never mind that this was America, not Nigeria.”) This bizarre, inexplicable act pitches each of the other Ewerike family members into their own traumas, starting with the infuriated, bewildered Amara, who gets no explanation from her father for her imprisonment, only lots of sweets and his own elaborately cooked, dubiously fashioned meals. “Pickles don’t belong in mac and cheese,” she dolefully informs her mother, Adaobi, whose futile efforts to release Amara from captivity leave her desperately pursuing solace, even possible solutions, through her deep religious faith. Meanwhile, Amara’s 14-year-old brother, Chuk, is compelled by the tumult at home to stand alone in the face of physical and verbal abuse from other boys in the neighborhood. When a gang jumps him, Chuk is rescued by Maksym Kostyk, the 17-year-old son of an alcoholic local handyman (another emotionally damaged émigré), who offers to give him boxing lessons. Maksym meets Amara, and they find in each other’s solitude the foundations of a romance—and a mutual resolve to run away from their respective family crises. The interweaving nightmares and yearnings of these characters are evoked with empathy, tenderness, and intensely lyrical prose by Iromuanya, whose tale of abiding sorrow and its long-term consequences serves as a reminder that, as one of her characters observes, battles might end, but wars never do.
An affecting, observant rendering of the immigrant experience in contemporary America.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781643755519
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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