A first novel that’s really about something, blessedly free of authorial navel-gazing.
Wray, a young writer of Austrian-American descent, slowly and surely creates a moving characterization of a casualty of both war and peace who finds himself both a son without a family and a man without a country.
The story begins in 1917, when teenaged Oskar Voxlauer leaves his family and village to join the Austrian army. Then it shifts to 1938, and Oskar’s return home for a brief reunion with his “Maman” (a former opera singer) and details about the death of his father (a suicide), before taking a job as gamekeeper on a remote property in the nearby mountains. Thereafter, Oskar’s present experiences (with old acquaintances and with a new love, an embittered woman named Else) alternate with italicized passages recalling his wartime experiences, culminating in the act that caused him to desert and undertake a 20-year “exile” among “Bolsheviks” in the Ukraine. Inevitably, the shadow of Hitler’s gathering momentum falls across all the lives that Oskar is involved with. The Nazi juggernaut is incarnated in the quietly menacing figure of Else’s cousin Kurt Bauer, a young Obersturmführer whose combative conversations with Oskar encapsulate tensions soon to explode in open violence. Wray paces this dark story expertly: once crucial revelations about Oskar’s combat days have been made, suspense is maintained by increased concentration on the enigmatic Kurt, whose rise through the SS ranks is itself charted in vivid italicized segments. The rhythmic alternation between past and present is handled adroitly, and the soberly realistic scenes are enlivened by precise, evocative descriptive writing (“Fox and weasel tracks scattered in all directions over the powder [of a light snowfall] and showed clean as picture negatives on the gravel underneath”).
A first novel that’s really about something, blessedly free of authorial navel-gazing.Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-40651-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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