Despite some strained coincidental connections, Mohamed creates three memorable characters and makes the experience of what...
Mohamed (Black Mamba Boy, 2010) takes on the Somali civil war of the late 1980s with the intersecting stories of three women: the elderly widow of a former police commissioner opposed to the authoritarian regime; an ambitious army officer trying to meet her military father’s expectations; and a 9-year-old orphan living by her wits.
Deqo is in a group of children set to dance at a military celebration in Hargeisa in northern Somalia, but when she forgets her steps, the women in charge beat her. Elderly Kawsar, who has attended the festivities with reluctance, rushes to help the child. As Deqo runs away, Kawsar is arrested. Unfortunately, Filsan, the officer in charge of interrogating Kawsar, has just been humiliated after refusing the sexual advances of a senior officer, and she takes out her fury on Kawsar. Coming home to her close-knit neighborhood unable to walk, Kawsar dreams about her daughter, who committed suicide as an adolescent after being abused by soldiers. When the government’s battle against the insurgents intensifies, Kawsar’s best friend tries to convince her to leave, but Kawsar stubbornly refuses and ends up alone in the abandoned neighborhood. Having run away after Kawsar’s intervention, Deqo ends up living on the streets until she is taken under the wing of a local prostitute. Deqo thinks she has found some semblance of protection, but when the prostitute leaves town, Deqo realizes she’s been sold to a pimp and bolts. Meanwhile, Filsan struggles to find her place as a woman in the military. Mohamed does not shy away from showing Filsan’s capacity for brutality as well as her vulnerability as a lonely, morally confused woman. She and her captain begin a tentative if doomed relationship before the rebels’ strength begins to overwhelm government forces, and the three heroines face final challenges.
Despite some strained coincidental connections, Mohamed creates three memorable characters and makes the experience of what it was (and remains) like to live through the chaos of Somalia’s dystopia disturbingly real.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-20914-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
