Heatwave and Crazy Birds
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
When her archeologist father died, Loya Kaplan left Israel seemingly for good, severing all ties to her past. Twenty-five years later, she's a flight attendant without friends or family, happiest in the temporary and artificial world of airports. Sleepwalking through life, Loya is summoned back to Israel following the death of David—her father's friend, or rival, or lover, or nemesis?—who has named Loya as his heir. Returning now to a country that has become alien to her, and the house where she was raised, filled with relics not only of her own past but of her family and even ancient history, Loya's story splits, deliriously, in two: the life she once led in an improvised neighborhood, filled with concentration- camp refugees and secrets, colliding with the antiseptic, well-fed present day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
There might be a compelling novel or, perhaps, several found in this bloated book, but it'll take an unusually devoted reader to slog through a swamp of excess to suss things out. Loya Kaplan, a single flight attendant who's starting to feel like life is passing her by, receives news that she's inherited a house from an acquaintance of her father. She returns to the Israeli housing estate she left 25 years before, now gentrified and called by the developer-friendly moniker Pinewoods Residential Estates. Loya is consumed with the past, and she thinks back on her previous lovers from around the world and her departed family; meanwhile, many of Loya's childhood friends still live at the estate, including Ora, no longer the beauty she once was, whose brother-in-law, Avi, sets in motion events that will lead Loya to face the past in ways that will forever change her. Avigur-Rotem styles gorgeous prose (such as the high heels that have made Loya "almost deaf in the feet"), but the prose alone can't carry a story that starts out as a nice tweak on the fairly standard homecoming/family secrets affair before mushrooming into a chaotic sprawl that too often mistakes top-notch writing for momentum.
