Often despondent, but enthralling, well-written tales of life and love.
In Zablah’s collection of short stories, men struggle to find affection among family and shattered relationships.
In the story “Oslo,” Habib bin Habib Al-Fulan fantasizes about leaving Miami to settle in Norway. He even goes so far as to try to convince friends and family to move with him. But his arrest for drunk driving and ensuing time behind bars may indicate that his life won’t become any better if he merely changes the scenery. While most of the tales feature the El Salvador–born Habib, whose grandparents are from Palestine, the lead characters aren’t necessarily the same Habib (some stories are told by unnamed narrators). For example, he frequently visits or lives with his mother, but in “Oslo,” his alcoholic father laments that his son “grew up without a mother.” Similarly, “La Femme” tells of Habib’s trouble with his estranged wife, Oona, and their young daughter, Tessa, but in another story, Habib has apparently never married. Whatever version of Habib crops up, he faces many of the same obstacles, from always-problematic extramarital affairs (some of which Habib himself is involved in) to simply trying to find someone he can talk to about the various misfortunes plaguing him. Notably, another character altogether headlines the standout story, “Leaving for Paris.” In this tale, Yuniesky “Doofy” Zabala, a Cuban named after his Russian grandfather, goes on two radically different dates—one with a paid female sex worker and the other with a dental hygienist, who doesn’t seem as easy to connect to.
Zablah fills his stories with striking metaphors. The title of “Why Are You Afraid of Growing Old With Me?” says it all. Habib, whose friend loses her sickly husband, contemplates whether his longtime but currently estranged love, Lucia, will care for him when he’s “old and decrepit.” In another tale, Habib is a conjoined twin with Fawzy, and the brothers have conflicting ideas on where to take their dates (and how the proposed evening will end). Many stories deal with everyday life, with some entertaining exceptions: “The Second Time We Tried To Escape Cuba” is essentially a heist story, albeit a delightfully unconventional one, in which a man hires two friends to kidnap his ex-wife’s cockatoo. Another story has a science fiction flavor, while “100 Ways To Propose to a Married Woman” is an actual list of numbered tips that occasionally clash (numbers 69-72 chastise readers for presumably disregarding 68’s advice). Although Doofy and the many Habibs are dynamic protagonists and narrators who shift through a wide range of emotions, the collection’s female characters leave a bit to be desired—they’re predominantly objectified sex workers and exotic dancers, and Habib rarely has anything good to say about the recurring Lucia, who’s usually cast as his ex. Still, the author loads his concise prose with indelible passages, as when Doofy is nervous about meeting his escort date (“Fear and sex amalgamated in his mind”), and a German American college professor’s eyes are described as “blue, like the pasty, fading blue off the Florida coast before a big storm strikes.”
Often despondent, but enthralling, well-written tales of life and love.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2023
ISBN: 978-1955585033
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Simi Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An accessible, entrancing story that draws readers into a family’s many triumphs and travails.
This posthumous release by first-time novelist Norris largely succeeds in ensnaring fans of multigenerational melodramas.
Norris tells the saga, based on a true story, of the Mattisons, a family of hardscrabble, mountain farmers in West Virginia who, out of desperation, develop a small outcrop of coal on their property and become miners. The novel follows the secretive, nefarious way the mining venture got its startup capital—which causes the family’s daughter, Gem, to strike out on her own, becoming the madam of the lone bawdy house in the nearby town of Fairmont, while her brothers join her father in what grows into the world’s largest coal corporation. As the Mattisons flourish and become a mining dynasty, Norris does a marvelous job getting readers emotionally invested in the ever-expanding family, especially those members working to better the hazardous conditions for the miners, despite the deplorable indifference of the coal barons. Like such generational-saga veterans as James Michener and John Jakes, Norris admirably weaves fascinating historical details into her narrative, with her exhaustive research giving context to events within her novel. Following the Mattisons takes readers on a journey through the development of West Virginia’s coal mining industry, which comes to rule the state. Norris, a former West Virginia schoolteacher, started the novel at the age of 72, but failing health caused her to set it aside in the midst of revisions. Her son Randolph rediscovered the work, which had been tucked in a closet for 23 years, and shepherded it through to publication. Norris’ legacy is an engrossing tale of love and heartbreak, wealth and greed. The book would have benefited from more thorough editing, though, to remove repetitiveness and fix typos, but the story’s overall strength overcomes these shortcomings.
An accessible, entrancing story that draws readers into a family’s many triumphs and travails.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481772693
Page Count: 260
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A page-turning, informative read with a tender shoutout to service dogs.
Hinske’s emotionally charged novel toggles between the storylines of a successful programmer who has gone blind and an earnest pup determined to ace his training as a guide dog.
The tale begins with first-person narration by Garth, a guide dog who is excited about being introduced to “Emily. The woman who would become everything to me.” On his way to meet her, something on the carpet distracts him. “Is that a Cheeto? A Crunchy Cheeto?” he thinks. “I love Crunchy Cheetos.” Flashback to Emily Main, who is in Fiji with her fiance, Connor Harrington III, for their destination wedding. They are a power couple—he’s a top salesman for a large corporation; she’s a lead programmer. Emily suffers from myopic degeneration, which could result in detached retinas, and a fall from horseback causes her to lose her eyesight. Emily, a fiercely independent woman, plummets into a deep depression from which she would not have recovered had it not been for Dhruv, a programmer on her team at work. Dhruv convinces her to attend classes at the Foundation for the Blind, where she confronts her fears, learning skills for living independently. Meanwhile, and separately, Garth undergoes his own rigorous instruction and struggles, including a traumatizing incident in a restaurant where he is attacked by another dog. The two narratives do not converge until the concluding chapters of the novel. Hinske rotates third-person narration of Emily’s story with delightful chapters written in Garth’s voice. Despite the dog’s own anxieties, he provides the novel with comic relief. During a training session on navigating stairs, Garth observes a “two-legged mother” with “a mass of gray curls on top of her head” approaching, and he notes, “I’ve seen four-legged mothers with that hairstyle—they’re called poodles.” While Emily grows into a fully developed character as the story progresses, Connor remains a superficial player. But it is the persistent kindness of secondary character Dhruv that will capture readers’ hearts.
A page-turning, informative read with a tender shoutout to service dogs.Pub Date: June 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73492-490-9
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Casa del Northern Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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