A vital, timely novel about what it means to seek refuge.
An expatriate Iranian woman struggles to reconcile her European life with her background.
Niloo is 8 when she flees with her mother and brother from their native Iran. Bahman, her father, stays behind; he has a life, and a dental practice, that he can’t or won’t uproot. He’s also addicted to opium. Over the next 20 years, Niloo sees her father four times. Each time, it is difficult to connect. Bahman finds his daughter humorless and foreign. Niloo blames her father for staying behind, for abandoning his family, for his addiction. She’s embarrassed by his village mannerisms. By now, Niloo has developed a successful academic career, married a Frenchman, moved to Amsterdam; she’s become sophisticated, cosmopolitan. But soon she finds and befriends a community of Iranian refugees in the cold Dutch city, most of them struggling for legal documentation. At the same time that she is embarrassed by her father, she grows alienated from her European husband. Nayeri’s (A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, 2013) second novel is richly imagined and frequently moving in its descriptions of the neither-here-nor-there immigrant’s life. No matter what she does, Niloo can’t seem to feel at home. In the meantime, the news from Iran grows worse, as Ahmadinejad takes power and protests break out. Nayeri manages these various threads—the personal, the political, the cultural, the generational—deftly, and the result is poignant, wise, and often funny. But not all the characters are equally drawn, and Niloo’s brother and mother get the short shrift: though they make various appearances in the narrative, they never come together as full-fledged characters. Likewise, Guillaume, Niloo’s French husband, seems more typecast than individually imagined. Still, we come to empathize deeply with Niloo and her father as well as with the refugees Niloo meets in Amsterdam.
A vital, timely novel about what it means to seek refuge.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59448-705-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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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