An unhurried but immersive tale of ambition and love.
A literary novel tells the story of a struggling Indian author in three romantic periods of her life.
Farida Cooper is interviewing to be an analyst in the consumer research department at the Chicago firm The Mandalay Market when she suddenly bursts into tears. Her interviewer, Percy Faber, has just told her that her lack of an MBA disqualifies her for such a position: “Her security rested on four supports: first, a job; next, an education to improve her chances for a better job; third, a home for sanctuary when the world became unmanageable; and last, a man to share her load.” Currently, all four things are threatened. The unemployed, 50-year-old aspiring author is 10 years into a master’s degree in English at a school that is trying to kick her out, and she will soon run out of money for rent. Percy, a widower who comes from the same Bombay Parsi community as Farida, takes pity on her and invents a position for her at the firm, and his interest in this intense woman grows the more he learns about her. Interwoven with Farida’s present are the stories of her two great romantic affairs: one with the celebrated literary theorist Horace Fisch and the other with Darius Katrak, a precocious 17-year-old student in Bombay to whom she was supposedly giving art lessons. The threads depict a female artist at three stages in her life, always finding herself at odds with the culture around her and claiming that rules are made to be broken. Desai’s prose is tidy and mannered in a way that mirrors its intellectual characters: “They finished in silence, Farida afraid she had focused too glaringly on herself, Percy wondering how he might help. Ascending in the elevator to the office again he invited her to a discussion of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.” It’s a long, slow novel that asks a lot of readers, particularly in its early sections in which Farida comes off as more than a little conceited. But as readers gain greater insight into the experiences that shaped Farida, the book becomes a satisfying, if somewhat antiquated, character study.
An unhurried but immersive tale of ambition and love.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2021
ISBN: 9798547971600
Page Count: 416
Publisher: KDP
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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