“I understand you’re doubly arrogant. First you thought I wouldn’t figure out your genius scheme, and then when I did, you thought you could deal with me all by yourself. No help, no backup, no arrest teams. Just you and me, here and now. I have to ask, how dumb are you?”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (OCT 22, 2011)

What’s a writer to do when his action hero ages? One option is to go back in time.

In The Affair, Lee Child flashes back to 1997, when Major Jack Reacher (his thirty-six year old protagonist and first-person narrator) was an army MP. Leon Garber, Reacher’s commanding officer, sends Jack to Carter Crossing, Mississippi, to monitor a potentially explosive situation. The body of Janice May Chapman, twenty-seven, has been found with her throat cut. Since the army has a base in the area, there is reason to suspect that a rogue soldier may have committed this and other grisly crimes. Although Reacher is a highly skilled and meticulous investigator, Garber makes it clear that under no circumstances should he conduct his own inquiries. A fellow MP named Duncan Munroe will be on hand to ask the tough questions. Of course, it is laughable to expect Reacher to sit on the sidelines while Munroe does the heavy lifting. 

We have long admired Reacher for his intelligence, toughness, passion for justice, and ability to scrutinize the evidence for subtle clues that the average cop would miss. In addition, he is independent and rarely accepts anyone’s word at face value. As ever, Jack is low-maintenance, carrying no excess emotional or physical baggage. Since he has a clock in his head, what use would he have for a watch? As the weeks pass, Reacher realizes that the Chapman case has significant political and legal ramifications; he will have to watch his back carefully if he is to emerge unscathed.

Lee Child has great fun placing Jack in challenging situations that force him to use his brain power and formidable fighting skills to defeat his opponents. All work and no play, however, makes Jack a frustrated soldier. Therefore, he is delighted to learn that the town’s sheriff, Elizabeth Deveraux, a former Marine, is gorgeous and available. The two gradually get to know one another a little better. Unfortunately, complications ensue that may put a damper on their promising relationship.

Child colorfully depicts life in a rural southern enclave, with its cholesterol-laden food (cheeseburgers, fries, and pies are consumed in alarming amounts), irritating busybodies, and obnoxious louts. The author’s terse, no-nonsense prose style keeps the story moving briskly. As usual, Reacher does not rely solely on his formidable fighting skills. He taps into his network of army buddies to unearth vital information and uses old-fashioned legwork and sharp analysis to unravel a mystery that he was never meant to solve. Child keeps us turning pages with scenes of violent confrontations, a torrid romance, a juicy murder probe, and an intriguing back story that helps explains why Reacher left the army so suddenly and became a solitary wanderer.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 492 readers
PUBLISHER:	Delacorte Press; First Edition (September 27, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lee Child (and Jack Reacher!)
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Worth Dying For 61 Hours Gone Tomorrow Nothing to Lose Bad Luck and Trouble The Hard Way The Enemy

Bibliography:

• Killing Floor (1997) /
• Die Trying (1998)
• Tripwire (1999)
• Running Blind (2000)
• Echo Burning (2001)
• Without Fail (2002)
• Persuader (2003)
• The Enemy (2004)
• One Shot (2005)
• The Hard Way (2006)
• Bad Luck and Trouble (2007)
• Nothing to Lose (2008)
• Gone Tomorrow (2009)
• 61 Hours (2010)
• Worth Dying For (2010)
• The Affair (2011)
• A Wanted Man (2012)
• Never Go Back (September 2013)

Movies:

• Jack Reacher (May 2013)

“I don’t think I saw the way he was threatened by his own desires, or how jealousy and desire ran so close in him he had to demean a little the thing he wanted. For example, me.

Or not me. It was hard to tell.“

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (OCT 21, 2011)

Anne Enright, author of the 2007 Booker Prize winner, The Gathering, has written a new novel called The Forgotten Waltz. It is told from the point of view of Gina Moynihan who has a lust-filled affair with a married man, Sean Vallely. They first meet at a garden party hosted by Anne’s sister Fiona, and progresses from there. At first there are innocent (and not so innocent) looks, and then on a business trip in Switzerland, the affair begins in earnest.

When Gina first sees Sean at Fiona’s garden party, she is happily married to Conor. There are no outward signs that there is trouble in the marriage and, as I read this book, I did not see the marriage and any shortcomings as a reason for the affair. Gina saw Sean, felt lust, and let her impulses prevail. Sean is married and has a child named Evie who, at the time that Gina first meets Sean, is four years old.

The novel is not told in any particular linear order. It is related to the reader in fragments of memory that Gina recalls. “So don’t ask me when this happened or that happened. Before or after seems beside the point. As far as I was concerned, they were happening all along.”

Always playing a key role is Evie, Sean’s daughter. When she is five she begins to have childhood seizures that continue for many years. Annette, Sean’s wife, is vigilant about Evie’s medical care and appears not to notice that Sean is otherwise preoccupied with Gina. Evie, however, has the sense that something is happening in her home that is not quite normal. At one point, she even sees Sean and Gina kissing on the stairs of her home.

The novel takes place at the start of Ireland’s economic boom in the nineties and progresses to the depressions that hits later on. As the novel starts, people are making more money than they know what to do with, buying second homes with ocean views and dropping hints about all the money that they have. By the time the novel ends, people are lucky just to have jobs. Their houses have been on the market for a very long time and no one is buying. The market has seen a real depression.

Gina tells the whole story in the first person and we go along with her as she does her best to remember what happened between her and Sean. She strongly believes that Evie is responsible for her and Sean’s love. Evie’s watchful eyes, times of poor health, and perspicacious study of her father and his lover mark an ever-present omen for Gina.

As the affair progresses, Gina finds out that she is not the first person Sean has been unfaithful with. There was a young woman in his office, many years ago, that Sean had courted and loved. Gina is careful not to ask Sean too many questions about this as she wants to see their relationship as special and romantic, which it is, but as life goes, it is not that unique. “Every normal thing he said reminded me that we were not normal. That we were only normal for the twelve foot by fourteen foot of a hotel room. Outside, in the open air, we would evaporate.”

During the course of the affair, Gina deals with the death of her beloved mother, Joan, her estrangement from her sister, Fiona, and the breakdown of her marriage to Conor. She tries to see these events in relationship to the affair but they all have a full life separate from her love for Sean.

It takes Sean a long time to leave his wife, time that Gina waits for him in agony and pain. She had hoped they’d be together by Christmas but as April comes around, Sean is just beginning to move into Gina’s home. “It was delicate business, being the Not Wife.”

The affair takes on a triangular pattern – Sean, Gina and Evie. “I said it to Sean once – I said, if it had not been for Evie, we would not be together – and he looked at me as if I had blasphemed.” “As far as he is concerned, there is no cause; he arrived in my life as though lifted and pushed by a swell of the sea.”

The book is filled with musical metaphors and reads poetically. Enright is a master of the inner mind and our deepest thoughts. She not only tells a story but she captures lives, sparing no moment, no movement and no detail. Nothing is too small for her to notice and reflect on. In fact, it is the small things that make up the big deeds that change our lives from one second to the next.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 27 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (October 3, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Anne Enright
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Gathering

Bibliography:

• The Portable Virgin : Stories (1991)
• The Wig My Father Wore (1995)
• What Are You Like? (2000)
• The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002)
• The Gathering (2007) 
• Yesterday’s Weather : Stories (2008)
• The Forgotten Waltz (October 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (2004)

“It was possible to hear a wide range of commotion coming off the meadow in waves: the din of the newly arrived campers—and what a peculiar din at that, the heavy grunts and human squealing, the many slurred and off-timbre voices, the disorder of it all—and beneath these sounds the thud of luggage on the meadow grass and the wet clicks of the cooling bus engines. Soon there were footsteps, a small regiment of them, crunching across the gravel pathway toward the infirmary.”

Book Review:

Review by Terez Rose  (SEP 21, 2011)

The dictionary defines “inverted” as reversed, upturned, and this aptly describes the goings on, again and again in John Dalton’s latest novel, The Inverted Forest, an impressive follow-up to his award winning debut, Heaven Lake. That the two stories are quite diverse in setting and subject serves the reader well, as Heaven Lake, set in Taiwan and China, was one of those wondrous, luminous novels difficult to surpass. The Inverted Forest takes place in 1996 in a rural Missouri summer camp, a sun-dappled, bucolic environment that still manages to impart a sense of subliminal unease.

A grand transgression has just occurred: the counselors-in-training have indulged in an illicit, late-night skinny dipping pool party, to the outrage of conservative-minded camp owner Schuller Kindermann, who fires them all the next day, leaving his staff to scramble for new counselors before the first campers arrive. New counselors are hired, but no time is left to prepare them, inform them, and thus when the first campers arrive, a mere hour behind the counselors, they are stunned to see not kids spilling out of the bus, but adults, severely mentally disabled adults. The disorienting, funhouse sense of inversion has begun.

Among the camp staff are lifeguard Christopher Waterhouse, winsome and personable, Harriet Foster, camp nurse, the first African-American Schuller has ever hired, and twenty-three year old Wyatt Huddy. Born with Apert syndrome, which causes the skull bones fuse together too early, giving the face a distorted appearance, Wyatt has suffered the lifelong burden of looking much like the disabled state hospital campers, but without the intellectual disability. His presence produces confusion and discomfort in people he encounters and never more so while working as a counselor for the state hospital campers.

Dalton is one of those writers, like Ann Patchett and Elizabeth Strout, who has a fluid, assured style that’s compulsively readable, instantly absorbing. A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Dalton was the winner of the Barnes & Noble 2004 Discover Award and currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He knows his craft, and every character who narrates arrives fully fleshed out with a rich backstory that has been distilled into a paragraph or two, usually with a dollop of wry philosophy tossed in. Countless examples exist throughout the story; I’d love nothing more than to quote a half-dozen, but I’ll restrain myself and limit it to a few, like seventy-eight year old Schuller Kindermann, lifelong bachelor, who craves order and prefers to be left alone to work on his hobby, crafting kirigami-style foldout paper creations.

“In his later years he’d come to understand a particular irony at work in the world: what you lack will always be magnified by the people and events that constitute your life. A boy with no appreciation for food will be born into a family of cooks and live above a bakery. A woman who feels no kindness for her children will see, everywhere she goes, mothers and fathers fawning over their babies. So it was with him. He’d gravitated to a career as a summer camp director. All his life he’d been exasperated by other people’s unwise longings.”

And unwise longings, it becomes clear, constitute a great deal of the challenges within the camp during the state hospital patients’ two weeks there. Desires abound, not simply among the young, attractive counselors, but among the severely disabled as well. Dalton, who’s had personal experience as a camp counselor under such circumstances, neither trivializes nor sentimentalizes the behavior of the disabled campers, but instead gives us a candid, clear view.

“And yet there was something outlandish about these state hospital campers. How had the women managed to grow fat in such striking ways? Not just bottom-heavy but with sudden shelflike ridges of fat that jutted out from their hips. They had either no breasts to speak of or hard-looking, conical breasts that looked too high-set and pointy to be real. With the men it was most often the opposite problem: a remarkable thinness, gangly arms, concave chests. A comic gauntness. You saw them from a medium distance and thought of old cartoons, the slouching, cross-eyed idiots with their awful haircuts and shortened trousers, their mouths full of sprawling teeth. But up close you noticed how each man or woman had gone inward and found a perch—unsteady maybe, or tilted, but still a perch—from which to peer out past the spasms and tics and whatever odd shapes their bodies had grown into.”

The story is narrated in turns, initially by Wyatt, Schuller and camp nurse Harriet, a canny, intelligent, single mother. It is she who observes the trouble brewing beneath the surface, problems that arise from the convergence of undertrained, overworked staff and the disabled campers that vastly outnumber them. Harriet’s suspicions over a staff member’s intentions come to a head one night and she enlists help from Wyatt to prevent a crisis, which results in an even greater crisis that carries long-term consequences for all involved.

Fifteen years later the story is inverted. The night’s drama, now history, gets turned on its side and explored from different perspectives. The past lives on in the heart of Marcy Bittman, former lifeguard, a character who allows herself to grow maudlin and sentimentalize. I found this was a brilliant way to add heart and sentiment to a section of the story without too much spilling over to the rest, which might have leached it of its taut hold on the reader. Former counselor Wayne Kesterton also returns, musing about a life that hadn’t turned out quite as he’d planned, the plight of many a dreamy twenty-year old. One afternoon on a city bus, Wayne encounters one of his former campers, the bad-tempered, vitriolic Mr. Stottlemeir, who loved nothing more than to spew obscenities at Wayne that summer (“Don’t touch me, you stinking puddle of piss! God damn you to hell eternal. God damn you, I say.”). This man, however, appears relatively normal. Through further investigation Wayne learns it was indeed his former charge, who’d finally been dosed with the right medication after years of trial and error, allowed to move from a locked-in facility to a retirement home. The unsettling nature of it hits both Wayne and the reader. What constitutes mental disability in the end? The wrong drugs? A low IQ? How low is too low? Should actions triggered by the baser, darker impulses that arise in all of us be judged by how intelligent we are?

Original and compulsively readable, The Inverted Forest challenges the reader to ponder the thorny issues of affliction, loyalty and desire. It’s one of those stories that will keep you thinking long after you’ve read the last page. A highly recommended read, a worthy follow-up to Dalton’s first novel, the equally recommended Heaven Lake.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (July 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Terez Rose
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	John Dalton
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Story of a Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon

Bibliography:

• Heaven Lake (2004)
• The Inverted Forest (July 2011)

“Americans are fundamentally unhappy, and they are fundamentally unhappy because they suffer from institutional addiction. If you consider the comfort (for most), the wealth (relative), and opportunities (many) with which Americans have matured, it is mind-boggling to consider that anybody here could be unhappy. ”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (JUN 16, 2011)

One of Zeke Pappas’s biggest heroes is Joseph Cornell, an artist who created “assemblages”—most of Cornell’s work were glass-fronted boxes filled with a stunning variety of found objects. Zeke loves Cornell because he “devoted his life to the collecting the unhappy scraps left behind by others and trying to distill them and make sense of them. Cornell’s work to me is about our abandonment of joy, about our reckless inability to hold on to something meaningful. This is an attempt to find meaning—no, to find magic—in our collective dross, in the castoff and the forgotten,” Zeke says during one of his annual visits to the Cornell boxes collection at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Cornell might well have served as inspiration for Zeke, who works at a mundane job in Madison, Wisconsin. After all, like Cornell, Zeke too wants to find the “magic in our collective dross.” To this end, Zee’s latest (and what he assumes will be his most enduring) work is documenting the unhappiness shared by his fellow Americans. He creates a project called the American Unhappiness Project, which simply documents responses to the question: “Why are you unhappy?” The project is funded by the Midwestern Humanities Initiative an institution that was created in the heyday of the roaring ‘90s but one that is fast fading into irrelevance in the late Bush years in which this novel is set. Responses to that elemental question, as one can imagine, are vast and varied and Zeke whiles away his time collecting and cataloging them all. His office assistant, the comely Lara, is also quite irrelevant to the project, and she knows it. As the institution and the project slowly wind down to their collective last breath, she tries in vain to alert Zeke about the impending disaster.

But Zeke has problems of his own. Back home, his mother is dying from cancer and he takes care of his orphaned grade-school-aged nieces. Zeke himself is a widower—his wife, Valerie Somerville, mysteriously disappeared on a boating trip many years ago. So it is only natural that Zeke wants a sense of normalcy in his life. “Lately when I see [my] friends, attacked by sticky fingers in a loud family restaurant near the Hilldale mall or struggling to change a diaper in the Borders bathroom, I feel not superiority and the tickle of my ample freedom but a searing feeling of envy and loss,” he says. “I want that, I think. That’s what I want.”

This “want” is further accelerated when his mother crafts a will naming Zeke’s sister-in-law Melody, as the potential guardian of the children. There’s hope however. Were Zeke to marry before mom dies, custody reverts back to him. So now Zeke is on a focused mission. With the help of a women’s magazine called Simply You, he makes a list of prospects and tries to woo them serially.

Chief among these prospects is the barista at the local Starbucks, Minn, whom Zeke impresses by accurately predicting random customers’ orders. Starbucks, especially one that makes a well-crafted Americano, is one place where Zeke is relatively happy. “At least among a certain well-educated demographic, Starbucks is a ritual—costly and mildly unhealthy as it is—meant to mitigate our day-to-day unhappiness,” Zeke says.

As the novel moves along, the Feds increasingly hound Zeke—they need to find out exactly how he’s spending the taxpayers’ money after all. Even worse, the principal funder for the initiative, a local Wisconsin senator, has been engaging in inappropriate homosexual relationships with prostitutes.

Finally, Zeke is out on the streets and his flailing attempts to find a wife despite insurmountable odds, start to wear the reader down. My American Unhappiness becomes increasingly surreal towards the end and Zeke’s endless soapbox stances on George W. Bush begin to look like polemic rants. At one point in My American Unhappiness, when Zeke pronounces that he’s on a roll, his assistant Lara, says: “You certainly are. A roll of BS.” It’s tempting to agree with her somewhat.

One responder to the Unhappiness Project sends Zeke a clip from a Robert F. Kennedy speech in which Kennedy quotes playwright Aeschylus: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” If wisdom were indeed to follow all that pain, Zeke’s is hard-won. There is definitely some measure of earned wisdom at the end, but it remains to see if Zeke will use it in constructive ways.

Bakopoulos is most definitely a talented writer but My American Unhappiness too often struggles under the weight of its own ironic asides. Like that famous artist, Joseph Cornell, Bakopoulos too is capable of picking up the everyday and turning it into magic. Fortunately for the reader, there are a few—though not nearly enough—flashes of that very same magic in My American Unhappiness.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (June 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dean Bakopoulos
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk Happiness™ by Will Ferguson

Bibliography:

• Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon (2005)
• My American Unhappiness (June 2011)

“He trained his eye on the barren land below, thinking of the concentration of human history here, in such a small corner of the globe—and yet how clean and innocent the desert looked from the air. After a lifetime spent in the urban landscapes of California, he liked this easy legibility of form, the broad and simple sweep of it, and played with the notion that his life here could reflect the same spacious characteristics.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (JAN 27, 2011)

In the period right after the first Gulf War, an uneasiness hung all over Kuwait—its residents forever waiting for Saddam Hussein to strike again. As an American expat in the country for five years around that same time period, author Anastasia Hobbet witnessed this unease first hand. It forms a perfect backdrop for her novel, Small Kingdoms, which tells the story of an assorted set of Kuwaiti and American characters.

One upper-class Kuwaiti family includes Mufeeda, the wife, and her doctor husband, Saaleh. They live in a huge mansion with their kids (who, they worry, are fast becoming too Americanized), Saaleh’s domineering mother and a whole assortment of maids and help. Across the street lives an American expat family—Kit who is a wide-eyed American who is trying to go beyond her humble Oklahoma roots; husband, Jack, who works at the Kuwait branch of an American company and their two children.

At the hospital where Saaleh works is an American doctor—Theo, a recent transplant to the country. Theo takes lessons in Arabic from a Palestinian woman in the country—Hanaan. The two are rebels from their individual cultures in many ways and it is perhaps inevitable that they soon fall in love.

The story that moves this novel forward revolves around the help, usually provided by South Asians. There have already been three cases of severe abuse and death of South Asian maids recently but nobody is paying attention. “…They’re mistreated and yet that fails to move us because we consider them so far beneath us,” says a local of the South Asian workers, “They’re cheap and expendable.”

But then, a similar situation arises close to home. Mufeeda’s cook, Emmanuela, a young immigrant from Goa, India, has been sneaking food and trying to get it through to a severely abused woman who is working next door. Deprived of food and fresh air, this woman is enduring the worst abuse and it is only slowly that word about her situation leaks out. Soon most of the primary characters—especially the women—will play a part in saving this woman from what would be an assuredly miserable fate.

Small Kingdoms succeeds in large part because of the tremendous observational powers of its author. Hobbet’s unerring rendition of even the smallest of details works to create a fascinating portrait of the Kuwaitis for sure, but also of the relationships they have with people outside their immediate circle. Very few authors are able to weave these kinds of precisely observed details effectively into stories (Jhumpa Lahiri is one who readily comes to mind) but Hobbet does so beautifully. In one instance Theo thinks back to his interactions with South Asians in his native California, when he meets an Indian doctor. He notices “the same blunt style he’d noted among newly-arrived Indians in the U.S.: Where do you live? What is your salary?” Hobbet writes. Even this seemingly insignificant detail is a precise capture of the community.

Class and status are important considerations in the society—Hanaan, native to Palestine, is considered a “bidoon” (a person without a state) and Hobbet writes about the class system that exists not just between the rich Kuwaitis and their help but also within the help itself. The driver for example, complains when his task is handed over to the gardener. “But he is just a gardener,” he says.

Especially interesting is the nuance Hobbet paints even the Americans with. To the Kuwaitis, Americans all seem like one big homogenous group: “Perhaps this was the essence of Americans. They could be fine people: sincere, well-educated, and yet very raw,” Mufeeda thinks. Yet, it is obvious that class plays out even internally within the expat community. Kit, who comes from a small community in Oklahoma, finds it difficult to get used to the idea of having someone else do the cooking or the dishes. She also doesn’t readily identify with other American women expats who come from presumably more urban backgrounds. “Everything’s alien to me, even other Americans,” she says.

As the book moves along, Hobbet also shows how many characters must face compromises that pit their cultural values against what they believe is right. The final choice might not always be what the reader (or the character) wants but it’s certainly understandable.

In a final sequence of events, the women in Small Kingdoms act in concert to save the starving Indian maid. In banding together they prove capable of uniting despite their cultural differences. What’s more it’s apparent that these bold acts are as much of a challenge for Kit as they are for Mufeeda. This is the only part of the novel, which I thought strained credulity a bit. Some readers might find it hard to believe that the ever-diffident, conformist Mufeeda would ultimately suddenly garner so much inner strength as to do what she does in the end.

The increasing tension surrounding the maid’s condition and the women’s attempts to free her is tied to a separate accelerating set of events—another strike from Saddam is imminent and the American families are ordered to evacuate. So essentially Kit must take part in this heroic effort as she races against the clock, trying to wrap it all up before she boards a plane for England with her children. This pacing too seems a little forced and eventually a little melodramatic.

In the end though, Small Kingdoms will be treasured for its contribution to literature about a place that is little understood. Hobbet’s enormous powers of observation allow her to weave a tale that is an insightful peek into daily life in Kuwait. The picture she paints with a varied and interesting set of characters is vivid and vibrant. You can almost taste the sand in your mouth.

What’s especially interesting is how much Kit and Mufeeda—women from two radically different cultures—have in common. It is Hobbet’s ability to shine light on their shared humanity that ultimately makes Small Kingdoms a moving read.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 19 readers
PUBLISHER:	Permanent Press (January 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Anastasia Hobbet
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another novel with insight into a Middle East country: In the Walled Gardens by Anahita Firouz

Bibliography:

• Pleasure of Believing (1997)
• Small Kingdoms (January 2010)

“It was as if growth had been the country’s vengeful response to Saddam. Spanking new three-story cement mansions sat on lots only meters bigger than their outer walls; all the freeways had been rebuilt; and the Cornice along the Gulf had been redesigned in its entirety, stripped bare of its immediate history as a battleground of the war. And everywhere, litter. It blew with the sand and grit of the city, tracing the fence-lines and thoroughfares, and cluttering the flat, dismal beaches. Children, standing on car seats, always unbelted, threw paper cups and candy wrappers from car windows like confetti, opening their little fists into the hot wind.”

Book Review:

Review by Debbie Lee Wesselmann (MAR 7, 2010)

Anastasia Hobbet’s novel about life in Kuwait between Saddam’s invasion of that country and the American invasion of Iraq is both gorgeous in its prose and compelling in its varied perspectives. Kuwait here is a real country, not a geographical footnote to a war, populated by people, both Kuwaiti and not, who navigate the difficult terrain of fear, loyalty, and social conventions. The story follows its characters to the brink of the second war where they, like the country they inhabit, face the changes ahead.

Theo, an American doctor who arrives in Kuwait following the death of his poet father, confounds the Kuwaitis and the Indian doctor for whom he works. Why would he want to work there if he did not have to? Even to the Kuwaitis, the country is a desolate choice for an American. The son of the Indian doctor, Theo’s friend Rajesh, warns that “there’s no more calamitous place on earth than the Middle East,” yet Theo yearns to erase his easy Californian identity for something more poetic: falling in love with a country not his own. When he meets his Arabic tutor, Hanaan, a Palestinian denied Kuwaiti citizenship despite having been spent her entire life there, he is faced with cultural barriers that seem impossible to bridge.

The other American protagonist, Kit, is the wife of an executive assigned to a temporary stint in Kuwait. Like Theo, Kit has recently lost a parent, but, for her, the geographical separation causes her more pain than comfort. Kit finds herself uneasy with the country and its social constructs, and she fears for the safety of her two children as rumors circulate of another attack from Saddam Hussein. At first, Kit is isolated, left mostly alone by her workaholic husband. She finds herself unable to identify with the other wives, who all seem more worldly and adept than she. When she meets her neighbor Mufeeda by accident, she finally glimpses the culture of her host country. Many traditions seem unfathomable to her, while others she finds exhilarating; however, what she learns about the underside of Kuwaiti society shocks her into action.

Kit’s neighbor Mufeeda, a true Kuwait in social standing unlike most of the other characters, is a devout Muslim married to the agnostic Saleh, a doctor and Theo’s colleague. Mufeeda runs her household staff as generously as she can facing the tantrums of her grim mother-in-law. Of all the characters, Mufeeda is the most traditional, a woman of her upbringing and station in life. As much as she hates it at times, she submits to the hierarchy of authority, both within her family and outside. For comfort, she turns to her religion. In one memorable scene, she runs into Kit and the other American women at the market where she finds herself caught between obligatory hospitality and horror at the brash manner of the Americans. Fittingly, she becomes transformed only because, out of an inability to rebel, she is dragged into a situation that confronts her with an ugly truth.

Emmanuella, a maid from India whose entire family depends on her meager salary, works for Mufeeda and, eventually, part-time for Kit. Emmanuella is the most vulnerable of the main characters, as her employers have her passport and can deport her at any moment. She risks everything to help the abused maid next door, and, in the process, finds herself at the mercy of a higher-ranking male servant and Mufeeda’s mother-in-law.

The paths of the characters intersect as the novel progresses, each story touching upon the others. Love, friendship, loyalty, and safety are tested. Theo, especially, makes an excellent guide through the intricacies of Kuwait from an outsider’s perspective, and both Mufeeda and Emmanuella offer what the jacket copy refers to an “Upstairs/Downstairs of the Arab word.” Ironically, given that she seems most modeled on Hobbet’s personal experience, Kit’s character is the least interesting, as her actions and motives are never as complex as the others’. Her naiveté often seems a device used to explain Kuwait to American readers, unnecessary since Hobbet’s descriptive language and other characterizations advance that understanding with ease. By the end, however, Kit is a pivotal character, as her actions propel the resolution for all the others.

Although the individual stories unfold with their own conflicts and outcomes, they share a common theme: challenging the societal norms. Each character faces a point at which he or she risks ostracism or physical danger by following his/her conscience instead of convention. This makes the author’s sensibilities seem typically American, but the novel does not suffer from this perspective; on the contrary, it gets its power from the courage of its characters and its critical dissection of cultural mores.

Perhaps most astonishing in this accomplished novel, Kuwait becomes a place so definite, so well-described that it comes alive on the page. Hobbet’s characters make worthy guides through this country of natives and internationals. Most Americans know Kuwait through images broadcast by CNN during the Gulf War, a country rich in oil but incapable of defending itself. Anastasia Hobbet offers a much more intimate portrait of a country struggling to come to terms with itself.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 19 readers
PUBLISHER:	Permanent Press (January 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Debbie Lee Wesselmann
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Anastasia Hobbet
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another novel with insight into a Middle East country: In the Walled Gardens by Anahita Firouz

Bibliography:

• Pleasure of Believing (1997)
• Small Kingdoms (January 2010)