A deft examination of sexuality, history, and father-son relationships.
A Pakistani boy is riven by duty and legacy and by his own desires.
At 16, Fahad is a bookish, sensitive boy who can't seem to evade the critical eye of his tyrannical father, Rafik, in their home in Karachi. His hopes to spend the summer holidays in London with his doting mother are dashed when Rafik demands that the boy join him at the family’s rural estate in Abad. Just as he's attempting to cultivate the lush jungle into farmland, Rafik intends to subdue his son’s softer tendencies, to make “a man” of him, so that eventually the boy may grow up to assume power over the family estate himself. To accomplish this, Rafik introduces Fahad to local boy Ali, who appears, at first, to be his foil: tough, brooding, and dutiful. However, as the summer advances and the boys grow closer, Fahad finds himself attracted to Ali, a seductive spell that overflows into an admiration for the overgrown jungle that his father is attempting to tame at all costs. As the relationship between the two boys blossoms, Rafik’s abuses of power take new extremes as he enlists his workers in building a dam whose construction is not only costly and ambitious, but places all of their lives at risk. A couple of decades later, Fahad has managed to effectively escape his father’s grip. A successful writer, he has made a comfortable life for himself in London with his partner. However, a phone call from his mother threatens the stability and ease he has finally achieved: His parents are on the verge of losing their home in Karachi, and his presence is required to manage the estate in Abad. Back in Abad, Fahad observes his once-despotic father’s descent into dementia as his own mind is deluged with memories of his romance with Ali. In third-person chapters that alternate between Rafik’s and Fahad’s points of view, the novel deftly captures the way the past—both memories and inheritances—informs the present and the future. Despite its concern for the past though, the narrative never feels stalled, moving forward with urgent and emotionally resonant prose.
A deft examination of sexuality, history, and father-son relationships.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-3746-0464-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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