A brilliant portrayal of the sufferings of Hungarian Jews during WW II, seen through the raucous and often comic prism of a small boy's stubbornly independent spirit. Jozsef Sondor, six years old in 1938, is living in the rural village of Oszu with his grandfather. Jozsef is separated from his mother and older brother who struggle to survive in Budapest, the family having been abandoned by their father, a successful playwright who will communicate only sporadically with his wife and children throughout the coming war years. Young Jozsef, refreshingly unlike the conventional sensitive protagonist of novels of this kind, is a rude hell-raiser who's often hilariously disrespectful to his elders and instructors. When the danger of invasion forces Jozsef to rejoin his mother and brother, he's ripped away from the comparative calm of village life and thrust into a maelstrom of psychic and moral disturbance that changes him radically as his understanding of what the group will face together increases. Nyiri, who's written one previous novel (Steps, published in 1979 in England), surrounds his young protagonist with dozens of vividly drawn, importantly involved secondary characters and patiently, movingly shows how ritual mistreatment of Jews, exacerbated by the war's unfolding horrors, initially affects Jozsef's childish pastimes (his ``playgrounds''), then slowly assumes fuller form in his consciousness and shapes his embattled growth. This wonderfully detailed novel observes the experience of the Holocaust in numerous fresh, pleasingly oblique ways (e.g., an old woman's plaintive question, ``How will they treat cats that have belonged to Jews?''). A novel with the feel of one that's been thought about and worked on for much of a lifetime. It's a wonder not to be missed.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-10918-4
Page Count: 536
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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