A flawed but valuable fictional reckoning with a failed revolution.
A reimagining of Egypt’s 2011 Tahrir Square protests and the hypocrisies underlying the state’s response.
Al Aswany, Egypt’s best-known living novelist, loves cross sections of his home country: Chicago (2008) and The Automobile Club of Egypt (2015) both feature sizable casts of characters who symbolize elements of Egyptian society. His strategy is the same in this ambitious and hard-hitting, if sometimes stiff, novel. As protests of Hosni Mubarak’s decadeslong dictatorial regime intensify, multiple characters support or resist the revolution. Danya, a protester and medical student, openly defies her father, a prominent general, Ahmad. Ashraf, a hash-smoking failed actor conducting an affair with his maid, is stoked out of his passivity by the nearby crowds. Asmaa, a teacher at a corrupt school, falls for Mazen, a labor organizer at a cement factory. Nourhan, the wife of the factory’s manager, becomes a prominent TV host, spouting falsehoods that the protesters are paid-off agents of the United States and Israel. Al Aswany means to skewer the hypocrisy that infuses much of the national psyche, how Islamic prohibitions are casually sidestepped to rationalize everything from infidelity to state-sanctioned rape and murder. (As one character puts it: "We're in Egypt. Injustice is the rule.") Because Al Aswany is trying to deliver a political portrait as much as a social novel, many of the characters hew to simplistic archetypes: Mazen is a clenched-fist pro-revolution sloganeer, Ahmad a coldblooded torturer. But the characters the author clearly has more affection for, like Ashraf and Asmaa, are richer and more flawed, and their experiences reveal how their acts of protest have social and personal consequences. And as a whole, the novel shows how the early promise of the protests fizzled, leading the country to lapse back into authoritarianism. Any successful revolution, Al Aswany suggests, will demand a wholesale cultural reckoning and tolerance for violent push back.
A flawed but valuable fictional reckoning with a failed revolution.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-307-95722-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
