Melodramatic, yes, but compellingly readable.
Fans of the Reverend Curtis Black series will rejoice with this latest installment of the extended-family saga.
Despite their spiritually rich environment, temptations abound for the members of the Deliverance Outreach community. This time, Curtis’ daughter, Alicia, takes center stage. Preparing to remarry Phillip Sullivan, assistant pastor of her father’s church, Alicia should be happy, particularly given that Phillip has forgiven her for ruining their first marriage by having an affair with Levi Cunningham. But as the nuptials approach, Levi finishes his prison sentence for dealing drugs and immediately contacts Alicia. Determined not to betray Phillip a second time, Alicia tries but fails to ignore Levi’s overtures. Maybe he's her true soul mate? But does that justify letting down not only Phillip, but also her entire family? Meanwhile, Alicia’s best friend, Melanie Richardson, discovers that her husband, Brad, has once again lost thousands of dollars in the stock market. He’s promised to reform, but he’s said that before. His late nights at work aren’t helping their marriage, either. To make things worse, Melanie’s mother—the delightfully rude and awful Gladys—relentlessly needles Melanie about her weight, cautioning her that Brad will stray if she doesn’t get down to at least a size 8. Soon Melanie finds herself slipping back down the rabbit hole of her childhood eating disorder, exercising twice a day, eliminating solid foods, and making excuses to keep others from guessing the extent of her problem. Roby (A Christmas Prayer, 2014, etc.) toggles back and forth between Alicia’s and Melanie’s stories, ratcheting up the tension as both women’s lives threaten to careen completely out of control. The writing is simple and clean though sometimes a bit saccharine. Nonetheless, Roby is a master of making a delicious mess of otherwise good, merciful, God-fearing people’s lives.
Melodramatic, yes, but compellingly readable.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-5956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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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