by Walter J. Schenck Jr. ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 17, 2011
Richly enjoyable biblical fiction.
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Schenck (The Birdcatcher, 2013) recasts the book of Genesis as a novel.
The opening remarks of Schenck’s new novel might unsettle non-Christian or nonreligious readers: “If you have never experience[d] the Holy Ghost’s presence, I will tell you this: it is an extraordinary bathing of pure, essential radiance.” But dismayed readers need not worry: The long novel that follows these opening remarks is far more interested in entertaining than proselytizing. “This is not Dune nor playful invention,” Schenck warns, but when he sets himself to retelling the biblical stories of creation, the Great Flood, the Tower of Babel, and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, his entertaining storytelling instincts come to the fore, and a tale emerges that’s very different from the familiar narrative of the book of Genesis. Told to eager first-century listeners by a very old Apostle John, this story and its contents are cleverly altered by Schenck to accommodate modern science. Life on Earth happens in waves of creation and extinction (angels visit the planet while it’s still ruled by gigantic, savage dinosaurs), until God decides to change the pattern of mindless, cyclical destruction: “The Father soothingly whispered to Michael the archangel, ‘Now we will create something different. Something glorious.’ ” The chapters that follow are familiar yet engagingly changed, united both by Schenck’s personal faith and his keen ear for dialogue. For instance, when the Philistine king Abimelech is astonished to hear that Abraham talks to God, Abraham calmly replies, “Yes, friends do that with each other, you know. We like each other.” Schenck also adeptly pens breakneck action sequences, especially those filling out the long narrative of scrappy Jacob’s adventures among the Philistines. Fans of religious and historical fiction—perhaps Walter Wangerin’s masterpiece The Book of God (1998) in particular—will find a great deal in these pages to keep them entertained.
Richly enjoyable biblical fiction.Pub Date: June 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-1462029853
Page Count: 724
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017
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
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