A lightly flawed but still mesmerizing look at a complex society in flux and one man’s attempts to effect change.
After his father dies, a clever young Indian boy watches as his mother is shunned by their family and society, so when he's offered an education through his father’s company, he jumps at the chance, then tries to change the plight of women in his country.
Even as a young boy in 1870s India, Biren Roy understood his father to be honorable and wise, and he knew his parents’ loving, respectful relationship was uncommon. When his father stays late one night at his factory job and meets a tragic death, Biren’s world changes in ways he couldn’t have fathomed. The English factory manager, who truly admired Shamol Roy, honors the man’s desire to see his two sons educated. Sent almost immediately to boarding school, Biren barely has the chance to mourn his father, but he does have the opportunity to see his mother forced out of their home and into the woodshed, a scorned, “cursed” widow. As he pursues his education, both in India and then at Cambridge, Biren decides to study law, with plans to return home and promote the education and rights of women since he knows firsthand how tragically women are treated. Back in India, Biren falls into a government job that allows him to mediate issues that British bureaucrats can’t solve, earning him respect among the English and mixed feelings from his countrymen. As his professional star rises, he must make haunting personal choices. Patel follows up her 2013 debut, Teatime for the Firefly, with this soulful prequel that offers compelling and devastating details of life in India set against the estimable Biren’s life. Sometimes choppy and disjointed, the story covers a large timeline and rushes through some of it, often using an almost dreamlike omniscient narrative style; however, the backdrop of the novel is Biren’s India, so a variety of lenses and perspectives that reflect the tumult of the times somehow works.
A lightly flawed but still mesmerizing look at a complex society in flux and one man’s attempts to effect change.Pub Date: June 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1665-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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