Harbor

Rating:
Summary: An Illegal Alien Arriving Just Before 9/11.
Review: As a first book, this is an impressive start. Few mysteries that I've read have been able to keep up with the changes going on in the world. With peace broken out between the U.S.S.R. and the rest of the world, you cannot use the KGB as the enemy any more. Here is a mystery, set in the United States but with the main character an illegal alien. Bewildered by the culture, a language he cannot speak, a world willing to take advantage of him and to use him for their own purposes.

And life is going at least OK when the F.B.I. starts to get involved with suspicions of terrorism both his and our assumptions about what is going on suddenly get much more complex. This is especially true as we realize that this is the time leading up to the 9/11 attacks. I find myself wondering just how Ms. Adams was able to develop such an interesting and complete character from a culture (Algerian) so different than ours. I think we have a new major player in the fiction scene.

Rating:
Summary: Great disappointment
Review: I bought this book following a strong review in the N. Y. Times. The first half developed very nicely - with competent character development and keen insight into both the culture of the algerian emigrant as well as the hardships faced by those who desperately crash the party we have going on here in the U.S.A. The first half was very promising also in what appeared to be a gentle, slowly building sinister undertow of plot which had one wondering if and who would turn out to be a terrorist leader, follower, or innocent bystander.

Unfortunately, things fall abruptly apart with the introduction of the immigration officer who intimidates the algerians. His character is thin and unconvincing. From here on, the book reels with terrible lack of direction. Time and place are changed rapidly and without purpose, leaving the reader less interested, not more. This technique is typical of, say, Robert Ludlum, or other mystery writers, most of whom do it much better. One can't help but feel that the author is thinking of a "made for t.v. movie" contract when the writing deteriorates in this way.
We try to attach to April, the head of the antiterrorist group focusing on our algerian friends. She also fails to convince, and we are left disappointed again.

At the end, one has no clear answers to the many questions raised in the reader's mind. Was anyone bad? Were there any explosives? Did Heather know anything? It is not illegal for a book to provocatively leave these questions open. However, for such a book to succeed, it must challenge us on a much more profound level.

Rating:
Summary: Great Story
Review: I read this book with skepticism because most of time it is very difficult to portray an immigrant society. But I was in for a surprise as the author did a great job describing the dilemma most immigrant faces in this country. Like the rest of the country they have good people and bad people. Like us they cry, laugh and suffer.

Great effort and great result


Rating:
Summary: Loved it
Review: I was moved by this novel. I really liked Aziz, the main character, who is a good person who has accidentally lived through awful circumstances. I admire how the illegal (versus the legal) immigrants had to struggle to get to Boston, to live "underground" and live in basically an alien (to them) world. What strong people, to be able to work long hours, learn English on their own (no cushy ESL classes), and find friendship. I was disappointed to learn about the FBI trailing them, although it made sense. I wanted Aziz to succeed. I wanted Aziz to become a US citizen, because he's a good, hard-working person who deserves it. This is a view into a world that most natural-born Americans do not get to see. It's easy to scoff at people who are not like us, or to wish ill on illegal residents -- but this novel showed me that really, they are much like us and maybe they deserve our consideration.


Rating:
Summary: A pleasant surprise
Review: I won't go into the plot or characters because others have done that already. What I found out, as I was reading HARBOR, is that the author used grammar, syntax and format to brilliantly illustrate cultural differences and the confusion that ensues. Those who want a simple thriller will want to go elsewhere, but those who want a difficult joy should get this book. Please pay attention to the fact (reality) that there are no heroes in this novel. This is what it makes one of the best books I have read in the last year.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointed in what I expected to be a great novel...
Review: It looks like I'm unusual in not being enthusiastically positive about this book. There is much to like about it: I felt that Lorraine Adams presented a sympathetic portrait of recent Arab immigrants to the U.S. and the difficulty they can have in adjusting to our culture. This is a much-needed book because of the huge divisions we have in the U.S. among Arabs, Jews, and Christians. I was really looking forward to reading it, and that's why I was disappointed.

Perhaps it's my ignorance of Algerian history and events, or maybe it's my preference for more details...but many of the scenes (particularly the flashbacks to Algeria, and the bar scenes in the U.S.) were hard to follow. I found myself scanning over paragraphs to get the general gist of the story, until I could get back to the more interesting parts. Reading over the many reviews of this book, very few reviewers mention this fault...although one called some of the text "unwieldy."

Incidents in the past are alluded to, for example, hashish dealings and one character's shady experiences in Paris and Morocco, but the story is not ever adequately told.

The intelligence services are depicted as clueless and apt to jump to conclusions without proving their theories. I hope to God that intelligent services are really not as inept as they are portrayed in this book!

The first part of the book was fascinating, and I was immediately drawn into Aziz's adventures. But the author eventually lost me as a committed reader. I did finish the book, but mostly because I was away for the weekend and didn't have other books to read. Otherwise I probably would have put it down.

I am disappointed, because I really wanted to like this book. I wanted more detail and a more thorough narrative of what was going on. I believe that the author has potential, but she needed a harsher critic before the book was published. I realize that I'm alone in this opinion of the book, but that's one reason I was compelled to write a review and state my opinion.

Rating:
Summary: Blindsided
Review: Perhaps it's my age - sixties - but I found this book excessively violent and crude. Many horrendous details were surely not required to give us a "true" account of the characters' inner lives. I recoiled from the killing by shovel, for example, narrated with gruesome precision. Have we come to this? Am I the only one repelled by such literal trash talk? Is it a form of art or sophistication to think up new ways to write dirty? Are we all so coarsened as to not even comment on the extremes gone to by this author? My copy is in the garbage, as I could not bring myself to donate it to my local public library.

Rating:
Summary: Writing about what you know...
Review: There is something to be said for writing about what you know...it brings a certain emotional intensity and veracity to the story, something that is sorely lacking in Harbor. Despite Adams remarkable achievement in presenting the story of immigrants from Algeria without the racism and fear that has permeated this country since 9/11, the story remains a melange of journalistic reporting on the socio-political history of Algeria woven with fictional characterizations. The result is an at times confusing mess as characters drift in and out of the bleak setting of the underworld of illegal immigrants. About halfway through the book, coinciding with the point when Adams uses flashbacks to fill in the story of Aziz, I decided I hated the book. The thin characterizations began to grate, especially that of Heather, and the jumpiness of the narrative began to frustrate. By the end of the book, I was left with the certainty that this promising book would have been much better if written by a recent immigrant or a native Algerian.

Rating:
Summary: a valuable effort
Review: There's no question that we need a novel like Lorraine Adams' HARBOR, an attempt to recount the experiences of a group of Middle Eastern immigrants in America pre-9/11. I admired much of the writing in this book, but I thought Adams' inability to bring life to her protagonist at certain key points prevented this book from fully working for me.

Some of the strongest scenes are early on, where Aziz (an ex-soldier from Algeria) jumps off a ship and swims into Boston Harbor. Of course, Aziz doesn't know the language and isn't in good health, and Adams does a wonderful job conveying his sensory disassociation from the world around him. Aziz never really loses that disassociation though, it's as if he spends much of the novel with earplugs on. Even when he's reunited with friends and later his brother, and begins to suss out what he thinks may be a terrorist plot, Aziz seems remarkably casual about what's happening. We also get flashbacks to Aziz's life in Algeria, where he - mistaken for another man - falls in with a band of mercenaries before escaping....again, Aziz seems carried along by events. Anyone not familar with Algerian politics will have a hard time figuring out some of these scenes.

I thought the end of the book was the weakest, as point-of-view ping pongs between several characters, including the FBI, and characters from early in the book are suddenly reintroduced.

Still, I think HARBOR is a very promising debut, and I hope Adams continues to tackle subjects of such relevance.

Rating:
Summary: No safe harbor in Harbor
Review: This is my first review though I am an avid book buyer and reader. I was so immensely disappointed with this book that Entertainment Weekly called one of the top books of 2004. The story fell apart mid-way when lazy, bad-intentioned and sloppy American secret service, FBI appeared. The story broke in two -- a story about the immigrants here and their reaction to the US officials -- and a story about the Algerian war. The point of view and story lines became a confused mess. I was SO let down when I realized I was learning less and less about the characters until they simply disappeared. Perhaps the point of the story, but immensely unsatisfying and bewildering to me in so far as established critics raved about the book. I vastly preferred KITE RUNNER -- which I read immediately after this book --on a similiar topic (new Muslim immigrants) but beautifully told.