Exiles

April 11, 2011
Groner does a serviceable job of blending a rugged Himalayan setting and Tibetan Buddhist themes with a gritty adventure yarn in this debut novel. After divorcing his unfaithful meth-addict wife, Dr. Peter Scanlon, a 44-year-old cardiologist from Berkeley, accepts a physician's job at a remote Kathmandu Valley clinic, taking his troubled but bright 17-year-old daughter, Alex, with him. Peter soon falls in love with a Nepali nurse and helps free a local sex slave, buying her liberty from a local "lard-ass hustler." And Alex meets an older girl named Devi and begins to explore her sexual identity. As the ominous rumblings of Nepal's Maoists play in the background, Peter is dispatched to a satellite clinic near the Chinese border, taking Alex and Devi along, where they witness evidence of Communist atrocities. When Peter is captured by young Communist guerrillas, his survival depends on cunning and the magical aid of a Tibetan medicine woman. Despite a narrative structure that borders on puzzling, Groner's picaresque story moves at a lively clip, dropping in an unforeseen plot twist that carries the reader's interest to the end.

April 1, 2011

A man and his adolescent daughter indulge their status as refugees from American society by fleeing to remote Kathmandu.

It's not exactly high adventure, but Groner shines a unique light on a remote, exotic land in his self-confident and culturally rigorous debut novel. His tale of a doctor and his beloved daughter takes a modern-day bent on Seven Years in Tibet and shows the country's turmoil with a palette that is as affectionate as it is startling. The story finds Peter Scanlon, an American cardiologist and long-suffering divorcee, dropping into far-flung Kathmandu Valley with his teenaged daughter Alex in tow. Their back story is a bit convoluted—Peter's ex-wife is an addict, and Alex has taken on a protective role around her long-suffering father. Peter is in-country to take a year as a physician at a local teaching hospital, but his gig disappears. Instead, he takes on a role at a small local clinic treating the most ravaged of the country's impoverished citizens. Despite their self-imposed exile, the pair finds comrades. Peter befriends another physician and duels with Mina, a hot-tempered local nurse. Meanwhile, Alex finds an abiding friendship, and possibly more, with Devi, a local girl who vacillates between an interest in Buddhist teachings and a loose connection to the local rebels. Peter also butts heads with a local pimp, forcing him to buy a young girl in order to save her from human traffickers. These struggles accent the abiding love that Peter has for his daughter and his heartache at her emergence into adulthood. "She had started her slow walk away from him, and even in her presence he missed her," Groner writes. "What he faced now was not her physical mortality but the first of the small, unavoidable deaths that lay before it." With worse to come, even the most jaded reader will be on the edge of their seats as the author carries the story home.

A fast-paced but emotionally resonant story about the bonds that hold fast when we're far from home.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

May 1, 2011
Peter Scanlon wants to escape his life, so he lets his teenage daughter, Alex, throw a dart at the world map to see where they should go. It lands on Kathmandu, and from the moment they land in Nepal, it is apparent that they are completely out of their element. Peter secures a job at a free medical clinic, but his training as a cardiologist is practically useless for treating what ails most patients, namely HIV, dysentery, TB, and a myriad of infections. He befriends a Tibetan lama and together they explore Peters feelings of futility, the evolution of man, and the meaning of life. Meanwhile, Alex meets a worldly local named Devi and explores her newfound sexuality. Then, when they get sent to help some injured mountaineers, Peter and Alex get caught in a Maoist insurrection. Groner does an excellent job of capturing the realities of life in this war-torn country, from rampant poverty to the beauty of a cremation ritual to the enduring hope of a besieged people in a spectacular land.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)