Rum’s nuanced approach to difficult questions of individual and cultural identity is refreshing.
Typical contemporary fiction about a woman’s journey toward self-knowledge and identity is enriched by the protagonist’s particular situation as the resentfully obedient daughter of Palestinian immigrants.
On the first page, Yara, a wife and mother approaching 30, announces her intention—and by extension, author Rum’s—to “reconcile past and present.” Raised in Brooklyn within a tight Palestinian expatriate community, Yara has always been torn, wanting to honor the history and hardships of her ancestors while resisting many of her culture’s prescriptions, agreeing to an arranged marriage but refusing hijab. For 10 years she has lived in North Carolina with her husband, Fadi, and their two daughters. Along the way she has earned a master’s degree and works at a local college. But as her life begins falling apart, she can no longer avoid the unresolved conflict she has always felt—the safety of obedience versus an inner urge to break free and claim control over her life. Yara’s central conflict revolves around her mother, a deeply troubled woman who, despite all-consuming anger and frustration, never considered leaving her abusive marriage. She always considered herself cursed and told Yara she was cursed, too. At a therapist’s suggestion, Yara begins a journal to confront her past, but the repetitiveness of Yara’s memories and her use of therapeutic jargon weaken the impact. More compelling are Yara’s struggles within her own marriage. While Fadi is deeply flawed, he is neither stereotype nor villain. And Rum does not simplify the choices Yara faces as a woman whose ambition conflicts with family responsibility. The couple shares a surprising degree of intimacy—showering together most nights—and similar unhappy childhood memories. Whether Yara can break the vicious cycle in which she finds herself is the question.
Rum’s nuanced approach to difficult questions of individual and cultural identity is refreshing.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780062987907
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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