The novel is set in 2015-2016, a time when Israeli forces began restricting access to Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem. Aziz, a young man at odds with his father, witnesses, alongside his friend Mustafa, the murder of their friend Hassan at the hands of an Israeli soldier.
The focus of the book is that compassionate curiosity of the narrator Eric as he tries to puzzle out his life, his times.
An object of disgust, Dengue Boy is marked from birth as an outcast. Beset by a sudden thirst for blood, which only female mosquitoes possess, Dengue Boy realizes in adolescence that she is really Dengue Girl and sets out to exact her revenge on the wealthy people and tourists for whom her mother toils tirelessly.
A work of historical fiction, the setting is a place Hussain has imagined where matriarchy plays an important role.
Nolan D. Insyte conjures a milieu that feels at once raw and surreal, calling to mind the spectral streets of Dylan’s Desolation Row and, in a sly echo of the author’s own forward, Wilde’s Vera; or, The Nihilists, where misfits and nihilists collide in a kind of gauzy, narcotic ballet.
I think one of the hardest things to write is from the viewpoint of a child.
Wodhams has woven a fine, rich tapestry of a story. Declan is a split-screen; a fish out of water crossed with loveable artist, who has very high hopes.
The Northern, which in a sense is a bildungsroman, serves also as an examination of contemporary masculinity.
With their time together limited, teenage tragedy is inevitable – yet James becomes more himself with each passing day.
In her self-portrait from a chronological distance, Percy celebrates a semi-misspent youth—all of its fiery enthusiasms and blind alleys, its dramas and earnestness, its lessons learned, misunderstandings, messiness, unbridled pleasures, and excesses. And, yes, humiliations.
© 2025| THE Miramichi Reader
