The latest rousing adventure from Dietrich (The Barbed Crown, 2013, etc.) shows antihero Ethan Gage, his exotic wife and a...
An American adventurer and his Egyptian wife join the search for a fabled object.
Ethan Gage was once a spy for the British and the French but is now loyal only to his family. After barely escaping the 1805 battle of Trafalgar, he searches for his wife, Astiza, and their son, Harry, who are working their way from France to Prague on the trail of the mythical Brazen Head, an automaton that foretells the future. Arriving in Venice, Ethan tries to raise money for his search by gambling. He runs afoul of Baron Wolfgang Richter, a card sharp who cheats him out of his money. Ethan steals it back, barely escaping the Baron and his minions as he flees to Vienna. Unfortunately, he arrives just as Napoleon’s troops take over the city. Napoleon, who knows Ethan’s plausible patter well, uses the American's skills to keep the enemy negotiating a truce, giving himself time to gather his troops and put them in the best tactical positions. Hoping to sneak off and continue his search, Ethan steals a uniform in order to lose himself among the troops, but his plan fails, and he ends up fighting in the battle of Austerlitz. Shot in the back by an anti-Semitic French trooper he ran afoul of by defending Gideon Dray, a Jewish soldier, he is saved by Gideon and his peddler father, who take him to Prague's ghetto, where he continues to seek clues to his family’s whereabouts. In the meantime, Astiza and Harry have also arrived in Prague and been granted permission to study at the university by Primus Fulcanelli, a Latin scholar who turns out to be Ethan’s nemesis Baron Richter, head of a secret society seeking the Brazen Head.
The latest rousing adventure from Dietrich (The Barbed Crown, 2013, etc.) shows antihero Ethan Gage, his exotic wife and a varied cast of characters grappling with an especially tumultuous historical period.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-219410-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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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