A quietly affecting novel of the refugee experience.
In Tuon’s novel, a boy escapes the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia with his family and comes of age in America, where he becomes a writer.
Samnang Sok is 5 when his family flees Cambodia’s Communist dictatorship in 1979, but he was only about 3 when his mother died, unable to receive treatment because “there were no doctors and nurses under Pol Pot.” This tragedy, along with the execution of two uncles and multiple episodes of starvation, causes his family—led by his grandmother, Lok-Yeay, and grandfather, Lok-Ta—to make the difficult decision to leave their home.They head first to a United Nations refugee camp in Thailand, which has its own horrors, including an attack by Khmer Rouge soldiers that forces the family to hide in a communal toilet; however, they’re eventually sponsored for entry into Massachusetts. Samnang’s childhood there is far from idyllic—his family is constantly working to get by, and his cousins are the only Cambodian children he knows. He faces nearly constant racism and never truly feels at ease in America until he moves to Long Beach, California’s diverse community. His desire to “take the language that is not given to [him] at birth [English], possess it, INFECT it with [his] presence, my history, [his] voice, and hurl it back” drives him to become a writer, which he uses to tell his own story. Tuon effectively uses this framework throughout the novel—no matter how long Samnang spends in the United States, he can’t leave his Cambodian roots behind, and he deeply understands that he doesn’t want to do so. Indeed, the novel opens with Samnang asking his maternal relatives to tell him about his mother; he’s eager to know more about his parents, whose “absence had always been a haunting presence in [his] life.” The overall tone of the novel is straightforwardly memoiristic; Samnang relates his experiences primarily chronologically and includes additional information only as he learns it from later interviews, giving the work—which closely mirrors events from the author’s own life—a sense of verisimilitude.
A quietly affecting novel of the refugee experience.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9780810147430
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Curbstone Books 2
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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