A welcome glimpse into a much-misunderstood culture suffers from newcomer Haji’s tendencies toward long-winded...
In Haji’s debut novel, an Indo-Pakistani Muslim tries to balance her family’s traditional values and her independent nature.
As the story begins, adult Saira suffers a nightmare in which “twin plumes of smoke rise” above a destroyed city and a woman is shot to death. Awake, Saira remembers growing up in California with her older sister Ameena and their moderately conservative Muslim parents. Ameena is the beauty, Saira the brains. In 1983, 14-year-old Saira makes a life-changing trip to Pakistan to attend a family wedding alone because her mother and sister refuse to attend. On the way to Pakistan she learns her mother’s family secret: Saira’s grandfather left Saira’s beautiful but unsophisticated grandmother, with whom he had an arranged marriage, for a young British woman, his soul mate with whom he had three children. On her way home from Pakistan, Saira stays in London with her paternal uncle’s family and learns another secret from her cousin Mohsin—their paternal grandfather’s idealistic devotion to Gandhi caused him to neglect his family. Back in California, while Ameena happily agrees to an arranged marriage, Saira becomes a mildly rebellious teen, appearing in a play without her parents’ knowledge. Then she goes to college, where she experiments with drinking, drugs and sex, including having a brief affair with a visiting journalist/scholar. After a break with her family that Haji, herself an Indo-Pakistani, coyly avoids explaining, Saira begins traveling the world as a journalist with now openly gay Mohsin, a photographer. She reunites with her family when her mother is dying. Ameena, who has become seriously devout, is happily married with an adorable daughter. Saira takes her widowed father back to India, where he remarries and begins to work at the clinic his father founded years earlier. After Ameena, who has begun to wear a hijab, is shot to death in the aftermath of 9/11, Saira rushes home to sort out her priorities.
A welcome glimpse into a much-misunderstood culture suffers from newcomer Haji’s tendencies toward long-winded religious/philosophic musing.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-149385-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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