Customer Reviews

Sunday's Silence: A Novel

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is set in the present, in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee. Isolated by geography and culture, the reader learns about the Holy Rollers and their snake handling religion, and meets some interesting and well-developed characters.

Ms. Nahai weaves a wonderful tale, full of passion and seduction as well as sadness and brutality. There is suffering and also love. And an acceptance of the forces of religion to shape lives. The story moves fast and I couldn't stop reading, enjoying the quality of her writing as much as I wanted to know what would happen next.

I was disappointed however. No matter how rich the description or how hard the author tried to make me understand her characters, she never quite succeeded. I never could identify with any of them or the forces that drove them. And while the details of their pasts were described in detail, I just couldn't believe them. Because of this, while I do acknowledge the author's craftsmanship, I can only give this book a mild recommendation.

Exquisite...Because Nahai is not interested in sensationalizing such extreme religious notions, "Sunday's Silence" demands that we pay them attention and lets us understand a little better their powerful lure." Los Angeles Times Book Review

SUNDAY'S SILENCE caught my eye at the library when I was looking for something else in the "N"s. The novel, written by Gina B. Nahai, is a departure from her two previous books, which are both novels about her homeland of the Middle East. What attracted me to SUNDAY'S SILENCE, when I read the book jacket, was its setting; the novel takes place in Appalachia--arguably, as far from the Middle East as one can go--and I have always been intrigued by the mysticism of that desperately poor, isolated section of our country. SUNDAY'S SILENCE is the story of Adam and Blue, "star-cross'd lovers" who share Appalachian memories and a connection on not just a physical plane. Having run from his past for more than 20 years, Adam returns to his childhood home near Knoxville, Tennessee, after the death of Little Sam Jenkins, the man who never admitted to being his father. Upon investigating the circumstances of his father's death--a preacher who drank poison, danced in fire, and charmed snakes with his group of "Holiness," cult-like followers--Adam immediately develops an attraction for Little Sam's supposed killer, Blue, a beautiful foreigner with a bevy of secrets. What follows in Adam and Blue's illicit relationship exposes a series of fateful secrets and alarming truths that will change the course of their lives forever.

As I had hoped, the descriptions of noble Appalachia in the novel are beautiful; Nahai's prose is haunting, stunning, luminous, poetic, vibrant, unforgettable. But I finished the novel wholly unsatisfied with what I had read. SUNDAY'S SILENCE is far from a plot-driven text; the novel is almost completely character-driven. Nahai spends an estimated three-fourths of the novel developing the histories of her characters and only a quarter of it discussing how these histories pertain to their current lives. Some of her histories are about insignificant secondary characters in the text, totally detracting from the already skimpy plot of her tale. The relationship between Blue and Adam was just not believable to me--because Nahai spends so little time discussing it, the connection between them is not firmly established. It breaks my heart to give such a beautifully-written novel a mediocre rating--but I couldn't help but be bothered by the lack of plot development and the OVER, yet ineffective, development of Nahai's characters.

"Sunday's Silence' is exactly the kind of book that Americans need to be reading right now, a book in which East and West collide, not only in war but in love. Nahai writes equally well about these two lost worlds, both beautiful and cruel, both with serpents real and imagined. The novel is a testament to the fact that even at our strangest we are not so different, that at our strangest we are most alike." San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

My daughter's school assigned this book as summer reading. What a nightmare! Sunday's Silence was a chore to read. It seemed like the author went to great lengths to do research and then insisted on including every bit of detail she learned, whether it was relevant to the plot or not. Speaking of plot, I'm still searching for one. I feel like I just read the author's notes on character development, rather than a coherent novel with a beginning, middle, and end.

In this, her third novel, Gina Nahai leaves the landscape of Iran and instead settles on eastern Tennessee, to tell the story of two strangers who become infatuated with each other's histories, which ultimately revolve around a snake-handling sect led by Sam Jenkins.

Even though this is not her native territory, Nahai has woven an admirable tapestry of three people's lives. That being said, the latter third of the novel loses much of the beauty of language and setting that Nahai evokes in the first 150 pages. It's as if she ran out of description and instead tries to hasten the narrative. The result is a book that's interesting, but perhaps not quite satisfying in the end. Still, I'd recommend it if only for the wonderful description of Blue's homeland, though I'd say if you want the best Nahai novel, try Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith.

"Astonishing...a searing romance, a spiritual quest, a compelling tale. Myth, history, faith, love and desire crash into each other and burn throughout "Sunday's Silence" but it is the interplay of all of these with fundamentalism that drives this lyrical work. Nahai's true achievement [is to] dig deep into the heart, soul, and--perhapst most difficult--the psyche of Christian fundamentalism at its most extreme. 'Sunday's Silence' is an eloquent look into the heart of belief, into hearts of darkness and hearts of light."

Good Condition Book. I bought it for one of my Friends who is from a Book Club.

Delivery took too much Time than Standard time offered.

Rest Allz Gr8

"Sunday's Silence--A literary Tour de Force":

"A novel of powerful magnetism. Nahai skillfully weaves the tangled separate stories of her characters into a unified literary tour de force. And she does it as effectively as Faulkner did years earlier. That's an accomplishment worth celebrating."

"A bold, passionate tale of fanaticism and seduction. Sensitively and vividly rendered. Exotic, mythic, a tale told by a Sheherazade...parts of the tale told on different nights, each fascinating in its own right, each contributing to the story but also telling more than the story needs. Nahai lays her story of a strange folk and the enigma of charisma against a background rich in hisotry. 'Sunday's Silence' is an ambitious and entertaining novel that will please fans of Nahai's novels. It could also win her new readers."