Review by Kevin Brown

Enter Ghost, the title of Hammad’s second novel, refers to the stage directions from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the ghost of which serves as a metaphor throughout the work. Sonia is a British citizen with Palestinian heritage, working in London as an actor. While her career has never elevated to the top ranks, she has consistently had work. She feels a bit stuck, though, partly due to her career, but also partly due to an affair with a married theatre director, so she leaves England, supposedly to visit her sister Haneen, who lives in Haifa.

While there, she meets Marisa, a friend of her sister and a theatre director, who convinces Sonia to play Gertrude in a production of Hamlet. Sonia, as well as the other characters, are haunted by a number of ghosts from their past. There are the personal ghosts—such as Sonia’s affair—the breakdown of Sonia and Haneen’s family, and Sonia’s career.

However, the most significant ghost is the Palestinian past that has led to the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Throughout the novel, Haneen and Sonia refer back to their father’s involvement in anti-Israel activities, and it’s a visit to the West Bank that has led Haneen to live in Israel, as opposed to London, where her father and sister live.

The Israeli government and army are constantly watching the play to see if it contains anti-Israeli ideas, leading to the real possibility that they could shut down the performance. Sonia ultimately learns more about herself, her family, and Palestine, but she also finds true community through the production, as Hammad reminds readers of the power of art, even in the midst of war and suffering.

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Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad. Grove Atlantic, April 2024.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Like Keegan’s earlier book, Small Things Like These, Foster is slight in size, but not in emotional heft. This novella tells the story of a nameless girl in the Irish countryside whose parents must send her to stay with neighbors for a summer while her mother is pregnant. The main financial problem seems to be her father who loses cows in card games and has a liquid supper on a regular basis, while her mother has too many children to pay attention to all of them. The Kinsellas, who take the girl for the summer, don’t care much for her father, Dan, and it’s clear he thinks similarly of them. The situation is one of convenience more than care. Or so it seems. The Kinsellas love the girl in a way that neither of her parents do, a care they show in small ways that seem obvious: her new clothes and a bit of spending money for ice cream; a lack of shame when she wets the bed; lessons on how to read and cook. By the end of the novella, the Kinsellas have fostered the girl not only by keeping her for a few months, but by encouraging her, nourishing her, promoting her development, and, most importantly, cherishing her.

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Foster by Claire Keegan. Grove Atlantic, November 2022.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

With Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan has chosen a title that seemingly fits her work perfectly, in theme, length, and style. Her novella centers on Bill Furlong, a coal and fuel seller in 1980s Ireland. His life seems quite small, as he goes about his daily routine, working hard delivering and selling coal, logs, and other fuel to customers, and striving to provide for his wife and four daughters. As Christmas approaches, though, he has an encounter that will lead him to make a moral choice, forcing him to confront his privilege and decide what his and his family’s life should be like moving forward. Keegan’s sentences crackle with clarity, presenting exactly what the reader needs to know, and little more. The book is brief—just over a hundred pages—a work readers can digest in one sitting. It seems a small thing, much like Furlong’s life, but it contains so much more, as it grapples with Ireland’s recent history of Magdalene houses. At one point, Furlong thinks, “Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see?” That one question sums up decades of dark Irish history, but also so many decisions we fail to make in our lives. Keegan’s novella is a great thing, indeed.

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Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. Grove Press, November 2021.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

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