January 1, 2023

In The Wind Knows My Name, the celebrated Allende blends two bitter tales of separation: in 1938 Vienna, Samuel Adler is placed on a Kindertransport train by his mother so that he can escape the Nazis, while in 2019 Arizona, Anita D�az is pulled from her mother at the U.S. border after they have fled El Salvador for safety. In the latest from multi-award-winning Israeli author Appelfeld, Tel Aviv shopkeeper Yaakov Fine decides to travel to Poland, A Green Land, to visit his parents' ancestral village and is delighted by all he sees until he tries to purchase the tombstones from the Jewish cemetery desecrated during the Holocaust. With Be Mine, Pulitzer Prize winner Ford offers his final Frank Bascombe novel, with Frank in his twilight years facing the heart-shredding task of tending a son diagnosed with ALS (100,000-copy first printing). Following the Reese's Book Club Pick His Only Wife, Medie's Nightbloom features Selasi and Akorfa, cousins and best female friends in Ghana until Selasi becomes angry and withdrawn for reasons that take decades to emerge. In I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, her first novel in over a decade, PEN/Malamud and Rea Award winner Moore plumbs love and mortality in a tale interweaving vanished journals, a visit to a dying brother, and the questionable death of a therapy clown and an assassin. A novel-in-stories like Rachman's 500,000-copy best-selling debut, The Imperfectionists, The Impostors sets end-of-rope novelist Dora Frenhofer the task of completing her final book in pandemic lockdown, as she comes to understand her own life by contemplating her missing brother, estranged daughter, lost lover, and one enduring friend (40,000-copy first printing). In the New York Times best-selling Schulman's Lucky Dogs, two women (one a U.S. television star seeking anonymity) forge a friendship while waiting on an ice cream line in Paris, but despite a shared history of having experienced male violence, one will betray the other. From Slimani, author of the New York Times best-booked The Perfect Nanny, Watch Us Dance portrays biracial siblings in late 1960s Morocco (their father is Moroccan, their mother French) who deal differently with the era's uncertainties; tough-minded Aicha wants to study medicine in France, while her rebellious younger brother Selim would rather hang out with the hippies converging on his country.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2023
Allende (Violeta, 2022) is a tirelessly imaginative and enthralling storyteller acutely attuned to the confounding universality of crimes against humanity and the traumas and tragedies they engender. She dramatizes the interconnectivity of suffering and succor in an ocean- and century-spanning tale that begins in Nazi-assaulted Vienna, where the anguished mother of young Jewish music prodigy Samuel desperately entrusts him to the Kindertransport. Sensitive and sickly, Samuel endures myriad miseries, finally making a home in the Bay Area. In 1981, Leticia and her father flee El Salvador after more than 800 people are murdered in their village by the army in the horrific El Mozote massacre. In the present, Marisol and her precocious, nearly blind young daughter, Anita, are forced to leave El Salvador to escape the escalating violence of an abuser. These disparate lives slowly converge when Selena, a social worker outraged by the brutal treatment of asylum seekers on the U.S./Mexico border, convinces San Francisco corporate lawyer Frank (whose grandparents fled the Sicilian mafia) to take Anita's case pro bono after she is left alone in a detainment center when her mother is shackled and taken away. One of Allende's many powers is creating intriguing, deeply sympathetic characters which she accomplishes with exceptional empathy in this incisive, gripping, and intricately plotted tale of genocide, femicide, exile, survival, compassion, and love.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Allende is always a must read and readers will queue for her latest mix of history, suspense, emotional insight, social commentary, mysticism, wit, and tenderness.

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April 15, 2023
A novel about all sorts of characters crossing all sorts of borders. Allende's latest begins in Vienna on Kristallnacht, when Samuel Adler's father is beaten so badly he eventually dies from his injuries. But Samuel doesn't find that out until years have passed: After Samuel's mother places him on a Kindertransport train to England, he loses touch with both parents. Then Allende jumps to the United States, where Leticia Cordero has ended up (illegally) after narrowly surviving the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador. In alternating chapters, Allende also describes Anita D�az, a 7-year-old girl separated from her mother in a detention facility after crossing illegally into Arizona; Selena, a social worker trying to help Anita; and Frank, a hotshot lawyer who joins Anita's case because he has the hots for Selena. Eventually--predictably--all these storylines intersect. Unfortunately, the two-dimensional characters never come to life. Neither does their dialogue, which is overstuffed with exposition. Allende uses her characters shamelessly as political mouthpieces. Hapless Frank, for example, complains: "But we can't just open the floodgates and let millions of immigrants and refugees in. What's the solution, Selena?" Selena, as you can imagine, tells him. This tactic appears throughout the book, which leans heavily on blatant exposition and draws heavy-handed parallels between Hitler's Europe and Trump's America. "Hitler used terror as a political tactic," Allende writes, "taking advantage of discontent over economic woes." This habit might have been more tolerable if Allende's conclusions weren't so trite. On Kristallnacht, she writes, a "sense of misfortune hung in the air." There is little here that is original and even less that is genuinely moving. Allende is too caught up in drawing historical and political parallels to imbue her characters with life.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from April 10, 2023
Refugee children flee from war and unrest in the powerful latest from Allende (Violeta). In 1938 Austria, five-year-old Samuel Adler is grudgingly placed by his mother on a rescue train to Great Britain. He completes the journey, and never sees his parents again. Samuel struggles in an orphanage until he settles in 1942 with a Quaker couple. At 25, he is a violinist with the London Philharmonic, and soon his interest in jazz takes him to America. In a parallel narrative set in 2019, Anita Diaz, seven, leaves El Salvador with her mother to escape ceaseless gang violence, and the two embark on an odyssey that sees them traveling on top of train cars and by foot. They make it to the U.S., where a new family separation policy leaves Anita, who is partially blind, alone in Nogales, Ariz., and her mother deported. Anita shuttles from one host family to another while a social worker and lawyer work tirelessly to safeguard her until she can be reunited with her mother. The two threads converge, first, with bitter irony—Samuel’s grandson is a presidential adviser who advocates for harsh immigration policies (and will remind readers of Trump administration political adviser Stephen Miller)—and, by the end, with hope. The dual narrative structure gives historical weight to the contemporary story line, and Allende finds real depth in her characters, especially when portraying their sacrifices. This authentic and emotionally harrowing work is a triumphant return to form. Agent: Johanna Castillo, Writers House.

Starred review from June 2, 2023

In Allende's latest study of love, suffering, and the steady reach of the past, five-year-old violin prodigy Samuel Adler waves goodbye to his mother in 1938 Vienna as he boards a train that will allow him to escape the Nazis while decades later seven-year-old Anita D�az is pulled from her mother at the U.S.-Mexico border after they flee El Salvador for safety. As the narrative unfolds Samuel's childhood in England, move to the United States as he passionately discovers jazz, and marriage to the freewheeling Nadine, his story converges beautifully with that of Anita, told through the efforts of Selena Dur�n to rescue her from the institutionalized cruelty of the U.S. immigration system. Selena is founder of the Magnolia Project, designed to help children like Anita, which brings in a lawyer named Frank who starts by falling for Selena and ends by embracing the project. Meanwhile, readers learn about Letitia, who fled the terrors of the El Mozote massacre as a child and whose story binds together all these characters. VERDICT From those who sought to help the Adlers in Vienna to the bonds between Samuel and his wife, Selena and Anita, and Anita and her grandmother, there's much love in a book whose poles are moments of great violence. Classic Allende enlarging her framework, as she did with A Long Petal of the Sea and Violeta.--Barbara Hoffert

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.