A sympathetic tale of love, loss and loneliness highlighting a largely underrepresented community.
A latticework of personal tragedies and cultural history underpins Shiri-Horowitz’s debut novel about immigrant lives in Israel, translated from the Hebrew by Shira Atik.
Violet and Farida Twaina, the youngest daughters of a Jewish Iraqi family, find their lives upended during “The Exodus” in the 1940s, when Jews fled the country to escape retaliation during the creation of Israel. Abandoning a sprawling house in Baghdad, the family arrives as refugees at an Israeli transit camp and then scatters to far-flung kibbutzim. Violet and Farida remain inseparable through this time of hardship, and subsequently through marriage and the births of their children. Their lives slowly return to normalcy, but other sorrows await—the death of their beloved former playmate, Eddie; early widowhood and its attendant loneliness for Farida; and an untimely diagnosis of terminal cancer for Violet. In her final months, Violet writes a diary for her children, Noa and Guy, to ensure the family’s past stays alive. The journal forms one part of the triptych of shifting points of view that illuminate this generational saga. Farida and Noa, meanwhile, offer insight into the family’s present and future. If political betrayals scarred the older generation, Noa grapples with betrayals of a more personal nature. Her emotional journey offers a counterpoint to the family’s earlier journey from persecution. Despite its somber narrative arc, the novel is leavened with passion (above all else, for food, which is almost a fourth protagonist). The Twaina sisters’ zest for life, despite setbacks, is seen in the dying Violet’s rich evocation of the culture of Iraqi Jews and in matronly Farida’s spirited foray to a beauty salon to have her hair cut, colored and styled. Such moments offset occasionally stodgy prose and some heavy-handed exposition. These are minor flaws, however, in a novel that brims with love for a community that no longer exists, and for the women who ensure that this lost community will not be forgotten.
A sympathetic tale of love, loss and loneliness highlighting a largely underrepresented community.Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615460796
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Horowitz
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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