A worthy addition to the lurid world of the Five Families, if not quite an offer you can’t refuse.
Don Corleone’s family navigates opportunity and treachery as Prohibition comes to a close in New York.
Playing around in the Godfather universe is a tightrope act. The original novel is a pulpy, popular synthesis of influences, while its film adaptation is a timeless classic. The video games are slushy Grand Theft Auto knock-offs, and Mark Winegardner’s sequels are labyrinthine marathons with epic casts. This time, the franchise falls back on more workmanlike writer Falco (Saint John of the Five Boroughs, 2009, etc.), who reels the story back to its roots through moments resurrected from unproduced scripts by Mario Puzo. It’s 1933, and the Don is at the height of his power. Peter Clemenza is Vito’s capo and Genco Abbandando remains consigliere. Michael and Fredo squabble underfoot but it’s Sonny’s explosive temper that film fans will recognize. Meanwhile, dutiful college student Tom Hagen is having a harmless fling—that turns out to be not so harmless when psychotic Luca Brasi decides to kill Tom for messing with his broad. In other boroughs, Giuseppe Mariposa conspires with Emilio Barzini and Phillip Tattaglia in his slow tango with the Corleones, while a pair of Irish brothers adds a new element to this dangerous mix. What works well is Falco’s depiction of Vito Corleone, which captures both the cool reserve of young Vito and the insight he demonstrates as Don. “To understand the truth of things,” he cautions Sonny, “you have to judge both the man and the circumstances. You have to use both your brains and your heart. That’s what it’s like in a world where men lie as a matter of course—and there is no other kind of world, Santino, at least not here on earth.” More obsessive fans also get a reveal about a member of the Don’s family, as well as a juicy unveiling of Luca Brasi’s back story pulled from The Godfather.
A worthy addition to the lurid world of the Five Families, if not quite an offer you can’t refuse.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-446-57462-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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