Review by New York Times Review
THIEVES OF STATE: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, by Sarah Chayes. (Norton, $16.95.) Greed, cutting across businesses, governments and military organizations, has been a consistent obstacle to establishing stable democracies in a number of countries in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the former Soviet Union. The author, a former journalist in Afghanistan and later an adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also outlines how corrupt governments can create conditions primed for violent extremism. MAKING NICE, by Matt Sumell. (Picador, $16.) Over the course of this darkly funny debut collection, readers see Alby, an uncouth but tenderhearted antihero, turn to self-destruction to grieve his mother's death: He picks fights (especially with his own family), drinks too much and dips into his mother's stash of pain pills. But these stories show that the way out of grief is through connection with others. PUBLISHING: A Writer's Memoir, by Gail Godwin. (Bloomsbury, $16.) Godwin, the author of 14 novels, reflects on nearly five decades as a writer, and "the practices and preoccupations" that go along with the trade. Appearances by John Irving, Kurt Vonnegut and other literary stars lend a nostalgic tone to the memoir, but the book's driving force is Godwin's hunger to be published. THE JAGUAR'S CHILDREN, by John Vaillant. (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $14.95.) After trying to cross the border into the United States, Héctor is trapped inside a broken-down tanker truck with other migrants, abandoned by the smugglers tasked with delivering them. As hope and resources wane, Héctor sends a series of text messages to a contact he's never met, describing his journey from Oaxaca to the border, and trying to ensure his story is heard. These attempts form the framework for Vaillant's first novel. RAVENSBRÜCK: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women, by Sarah Helm. (Anchor, $20.) Fifty miles north of Berlin, a concentration camp built for female prisoners was the site of executions, horrific medical experiments and beatings. Only a small number of prisoners were Jewish; others included prostitutes, Communists and aristocrats (Fiorello La Guardia's sister was imprisoned there for a time). THE DIVER'S CLOTHES LIE EMPTY, by Vendela Vida. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $14.99.) On a trip to Morocco, an unnamed narrator loses her passport and wallet, and is granted the opportunity to step into a new identity. As Fernanda Eberstadt wrote here, the novel "portrays with cool wit and suspense the explosive emancipation of a woman" poised "to grab some warmth, drama, magic for herself." MICHELLE OBAMA: A Life, by Peter Slevin. (Vintage, $17.) Slevin's thoughtful biography details the first lady's academic and professional accomplishments, and shows the farreaching effects of her childhood and loving, supportive parents; without their influence, "there might not now be a black first family in the White House," Amy Chozick said here.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 3, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* What horror is the narrator fleeing as she boards a flight from Miami to Casablanca? Vida's (Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, 2007; The Lovers, 2010) third elegant novel about a solitary, wounded young American woman on a dangerous quest in a foreign land is a gorgeously slippery and covertly cosmic tale about identity, theft, and recovery. As this brooding traveler is checking into her modest hotel, her brand-new backpack is stolen. The ensuing investigation is an absurd tangle of deception and corruption, inducing our besieged narrator to go to another hotel and assume another name. She turns out to be a twin, a strong swimmer, and quite a chameleon. When a famous American movie star on a shoot needs a stand-in, Vida's protagonist is summarily recruited, and her stint as a body double quickly engenders ever-deepening complications and risks. When she idly opens a book of poems by the Sufi mystic, Rumi, and reads The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty and once we learn the truth about her sorrow, the full intricacy of Vida's brilliant inquiry into the eternal mysteries of being is dazzlingly unveiled. Told cinematically in one long, bewitching take, Vida's astutely insightful, keenly suspenseful, surreptitiously metaphysical novel demands to be read in a breath-held trance and then plunged into again.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A 34-year-old divorcée takes a 10-day vacation in Casablanca and, after her backpack is stolen, decides to shed her identity, a decision that releases her into the streets of Morocco and the depths of her own past. With her fourth novel, Vida (The Lovers) returns to familiar themes of identity and recovery, concerns that are well suited to stories about traveling abroad. Suspicious of her hotel and the police after the robbery, the woman takes advantage of a clerical error and commandeers another American's identity: Sabine Alyse. With Sabine's credit cards, she checks into the Hyatt, where a large film production has taken over the hotel, and soon makes friends with the famous actress starring in the movie. Written in the second person, the novel invites the reader to experience the protagonist's separation firsthand. And as the woman's situation becomes more complicated and her actions increasingly brazen, bits of her past are teased out. The result is an emotional and formally clever exploration of identity. Vida's descriptive powers and restraint help to avoid the repetitive hammering of you that bogs down most second-person novels. Hard-boiled and inventive, the book takes a bold swing at mixing genres. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A stolen backpack in Casablanca prompts a host of more psychological losses for the heroine of this high-tension narrative. Every novel by Vida explores what distance from home can do to an American woman's perception of herself, whether the locale is the Philippines (And Now You Can Go, 2003), Lapland (Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, 2007), or Turkey (The Lovers, 2010). Here, the unnamed narrator has arrived in Morocco for a solitary getawaythe details as to why aren't disclosed till the endingbut the backpack containing her laptop, camera, credit cards, and passport is taken from her just as she's checking into her hotel. The Kafkaesque plot turns that ensue serve to further erase her from the map; she claims another woman's papers from a backpack the police wrongly believe is hers; a police report she needs to recover her identity goes missing; and, in a turn that occupies the heart of the novel, she takes a job as a stand-in for a famous actress who's filming a movie in the city. The novel's second-person voice is a not-so-subtle prompt for the reader to think about how he or she might act in these predicaments and a more slippery prompt to think about what identity is: who are "you" when your family, sense of place, and skills are expunged? Vida's plainspoken, sometimes ice-cold minimalist style serves the question well, though the novel struggles to arrive at a clean conclusion, even a cleanly ambiguous one. Juggling the heroine's Casablanca predicament with an increasingly wrenching recollection of the emotional messes she left back in the States, Vida works in unlikely coincidences and fits of flightiness to sell the character's sense of dispossession. But the novel still packs a wallop, taking the themes of Camus and Kierkegaard and transplanting them into a story with the pace and intrigue of a page-turner. A speedy and suspenseful fish-out-of-water tale with a slyly philosophical bent. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
