A guilt-haunted man examines what he sees as his role in a terrible crime committed by his wife.
“When did you know your wife was a sociopath?” asks the first line of this novel. Michael Sanders, recently promoted to director of financial aid for a Chicago-area university, and his wife, Liz, are ready to start a family, but at 35, Liz is finding it difficult to become pregnant—and she reacts pathologically. Michael already carries an enormous burden of guilt for in some way contributing to Liz’s parents’ deaths (just how is revealed late in the book), and as a result, he feels responsible for making sure Liz gets everything she wants: “I spent the last ten years foolishly covering up my own devastating mistake and nurturing dysfunction in my wife….Even though I didn’t commit the crime with my own hands, I am truly just as guilty as Liz.” Although Nicola (The Lives of Skeletons, 2012, etc.) casts Michael’s core problem as one of turning away from God, the real problem—shared by both Michael and Liz—is their dearth of emotional intelligence. For this, Nicola provides abundant and well-delineated evidence of secrets and lies. Liz pretends to have forgiven the drunk driver who killed her parents, but she’s lying; Michael knows that Liz’s father was no saint, “but Liz didn’t need to know that”; Michael is upset that Liz doesn’t ask him about his own feelings about infertility, but he doesn’t tell her; Michael keeps financial troubles from Liz, and Liz painstakingly fakes a pregnancy. Though the truths come out, even at the end, Michael calls Liz “a monster of my own creation,” which goes beyond taking responsibility for his own actions, as if Liz is incapable of agency. He’s still treating her as too weak-minded to have made her own decisions. Some readers may appreciate this view of husbandly responsibility; many will be turned off. Nicola does skillfully build suspense, however, taking readers through Liz’s crazy logic step by step and showing just how an otherwise sane woman could make her choices. Liz’s self-righteousness is chilling and well-observed.
Clearly shows the toxic thinking in a bad relationship, but not all readers will be satisfied with the resolution.
Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499702125
Page Count: 330
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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