Like an Indian Maeve Binchy, Divakaruni offers an entertaining if lightweight comfort read.
Although her heroine travels to the United States to unravel family secrets, the heart of Divakaruni's cross-cultural novel (One Amazing Thing, 2010, etc.) lies in contemporary Kolkata, India.
Orphaned in infancy, 18-year-old Korobi (the name for Oleander) has been raised in a cocoon of privilege and protectiveness by her devoted maternal grandparents. They have told Korobi little about her parents, but she has found and cherishes a love letter she assumes was written by her mother to her dead father shortly after she was born. Korobi has recently become engaged to Rajat Bose, a far more sophisticated, modern young man whose family owns art galleries in Kolkata and New York City. Korobi’s life seems perfect. But then Korobi’s grandfather, a stern traditionalist, collapses at the formal engagement party. After his death, Korobi’s grandmother acknowledges some bitter truths: Not only is Korobi’s father alive, an African-American whom Korobi’s mother met while studying at Berkley, but he and Korobi’s mother were not yet married when Korobi’s mother died. Despite the potential scandal that she is illegitimate and half African-American, Rajat still wants to marry Korobi, but she becomes obsessed with finding her father before marrying. Although his patience is understandably strained, Rajat stands behind Korobi’s decision to travel alone to America for a month on her quest. In America, the innocent—to the point of being naïve—Korobi faces challenges she has never imagined and takes increasing control of her life as she searches for clues about her father with the help of a kindly Indian private detective. She and Rajat, who has shielded her from his own worries about his family’s increasing financial problems since 9/11, begin to drift apart. She is tempted by a new attraction; he is pursued by a former lover. Both must find a balance between old and new values. Surrounded by diverting secondary characters, Korobi herself is so self-absorbed that it is hard not to feel sorry for long-suffering Rajat.
Like an Indian Maeve Binchy, Divakaruni offers an entertaining if lightweight comfort read.Pub Date: March 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9565-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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