Waiting for Rescue Book

Jarring yet slyly comic, Waiting for Rescue evokes a world turned upside down after the events of 9/11 as seen through the eyes of a wry and observant American woman who, though far from the path of the hijacked planes, is thrown into turmoil nevertheless. As a teacher in Boston working with health professionals from around the world, her sudden grief and sense of impending violence gradually pervade every facet of her life and change forever her understanding of the “good works” her colleagues and her students believe they do.

In Honig’s global landscape, the paths of vastly different people crisscross with the narrator’s: a Muslim family in America dealing with cancer, then ethnic profiling; an aging researcher hoping to make his mark in bio-terror’s next big thing; a feisty girl in Kenya whose parents have AIDS; a nerdy high school teacher who commits a terrible crime that returns to haunt, decades later.

Everywhere the author takes us — the classroom and the bedroom, in hallways of hospitals and the offices of ambitious researchers, in the slums of Nairobi and the streets of Boston, at office parties and bedside vigils — events intersect in a unique commentary on the imbalances of our times.

Publishers Weekly

Honig's latest reads like a treatise on the failures of international aid masquerading as fiction. Insufferable narrator Erika, a writing instructor at a Boston university, tells us of Ibrahim, a bright young student from Abu Dhabi dying of cancer whose brother-in-law is a victim of ethnic profiling (which might be moving if it wasn't so expected); of university office politics; and of research programs that look on while AIDS victims get sicker and families get poorer. A contrived subplot, reinforcing that fear is all around us, relates the story of Erika's high school biology teacher, who hacked a prostitute to death. As it turns out, his son, Toby, just happens to work in Erika's department, and while Erika's empathy knows no bounds for the poor and oppressed, she is a bully who cannot stop herself from tormenting bubbly Toby, who asks little more of her than that she sample his wife's baked goods. Erika's unchallenged self-righteousness is off-putting and nearly impossible to get past. (Sept.)