Tsabari creates complex, conflicted, prickly people you'll want to get to know better.
Where is the best place on Earth? The characters in Tsabari's debut collection (winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature) are searching for somewhere to feel at home, whether they're travelers, emigrants, or just restlessly living in the place they were born.
Tsabari was born in Israel to a family of Yemeni descent, and she moved to Vancouver in 1998; she only started writing in English 10 years ago. Her Israeli characters feel out of place in their own country because, like Tsabari's family, they come from Arab backgrounds and aren't Ashkenazi, like most Israeli Jews; some have left for Canada or Britain. In "A Sign of Harmony," Maya travels to India with her new boyfriend, Ian, who has an Indian father and an English mother and has never been to India before. It's her fourth trip—she travels there each fall to buy fabrics and other merchandise to sell in Europe—and she feels more at home than he does. Several of Tsabari's characters are traversing the foreign land of adolescence, trying to make friends and test their sexuality while dealing with larger forces. Lily moves from Canada to Israel to live with her aunt after her mother dies, and is scared and thrilled when her new friend Lana kisses her. But her family's identity is always in the background when she's in Israel: "My grandparents came from Yemen, so we are Arabs in a way, Arab Jews." Seeming contradictions like that are everywhere in Tsabari's world. In "Invisible," Rosalynn is a Filipino immigrant who's overstayed her visa; she takes care of an old woman she calls "Savta," Hebrew for "grandmother," who also takes care of her. Characters embrace their mandatory army service, run away from it, or use it to their own ends. In the stunning opening story, "Tikkun," the first-person narrator runs into his ex-girlfriend, whom he hasn't seen in seven years, and is surprised to see she's become an Orthodox Jew. As they sit down to share a coffee, the narrator scans the patio, taking in the other patrons: "We are all trained to identify potential threats." One woman grew up in a small town in the Sinai, which she was forced to leave when Israel returned the peninsula to Egypt, but she doesn't want to label her family as "settlers"—"It was different then. They didn't go there for ideological reasons." But is it possible to be innocent in this world?
Tsabari creates complex, conflicted, prickly people you'll want to get to know better.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8893-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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