A brisk, winsome caper.
From 100-year-old Hotchner (Hemingway in Love, 2015, etc.), noted biographer of Hemingway, Doris Day, and others, comes this slender, sweet-tempered boy-sleuth tale set in Depression-era St. Louis.
At 12, Aaron Broom is precocious. With his mother interned in a tuberculosis sanitarium and his rent-jumping, electricity-pirating salesman dad just scraping by, he has to be. The novel begins briskly, with Aaron left outside to protect their precious truck from the repo men while his father goes into a jewelry store to ply his company's watches. When his father is buzzed inside with his bulky sample case, Aaron sees a heavyset man scurry in behind him. Then he hears shots and sees the display window shatter and the man flee while stashing his gun in his waistband. Soon Aaron's father is escorted out in handcuffs, and Aaron, by now eavesdropping on the assembled officers, discovers that his dad has been taken in as a material witness and possible accomplice. He will be kept without bail. Aaron, suddenly on his own, soon determines that the only way of getting his father released is to do a bit of "detectifying" and unmask the culprit himself. He begins to investigate the jewelry store's employees, enlisting the aid of a motley group of kids and adults: a newspaper street vendor, an epileptic ex-neighbor girl who lives in a Hooverville near the river, a maritime lawyer, the kindly palooka who manages the building where Aaron and his father have been living. Are there extremely convenient plot twists? Yes. Implausibilities, shortcuts? Fine. Could this all be derided as sepia-toned hokum? Sure. But Hotchner's storytelling is fast-paced, his feel for period detail sure-handed, his vision of humanity-facing-adversity persistently sunny, and his regard for the boy's resourcefulness contagious.
A brisk, winsome caper.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-385-54358-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
Urgent moral questions underlie a captivating mystery.
Sequestered at a boarding school during World War II, a rebellious teenager confronts secrets, lies, and danger.
Published in Hungary in 1970, and translated into English for the first time by Rix, this intricately plotted novel by Prix Femina Étranger winner Szabó (1917-2007) (Katalin Street, 2017, etc.) complicates a predictable coming-of-age tale by setting it in perilous times: War rages, patriotism incites bitterness and bigotry, and a clandestine resistance movement stealthily arises. When 14-year-old Gina is sent suddenly from her home in Budapest to an elite religious school in the provinces, she feels deeply bereft: of her beloved governess, who was forced to return to her native France; of her aunt’s delightful tea dances; of encounters with a handsome lieutenant with whom she is infatuated; and, most of all, of her father, whom she loves so deeply that she “felt the world complete only when they were together.” Protected, indulged, and self-absorbed, Gina suffers protracted (and somewhat irritating) adolescent angst. She hates the academy: Once a medieval monastery, it looms like a fortress; girls, dressed in black uniforms, their hair braided unfashionably, are forbidden to bring jewelry, scented soaps, or even toothbrushes from home. Obedience to Christian precepts and school authority is strictly enforced—and, by Gina, repeatedly flouted. She breaks rules, antagonizes her teachers and classmates, and mocks rituals and traditions, including the girls’ veneration of a statue they call Abigail, which has the uncanny power to know everything that happens at the school and offer warnings and sage advice. “All my life I have been a wild thing,” Gina reflects. “I am impatient and impulsive, and I have never learned to love people who annoy me or try to hurt me.” But when her father, visiting unexpectedly, reveals the reason he had to send her away, she vows to behave and realizes that Abigail is watching over her. Far from a supernatural being, Abigail’s real identity, Gina believes, is “someone inside these fortress walls who lives a secret life.”
Urgent moral questions underlie a captivating mystery.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68137-403-1
Page Count: 360
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
It's all quite entertaining and memorable.
Here, Follett sets the thrillers aside for a long, steady story about building a cathedral in 12th-century England.
Bloodthirsty or adventure-crazed Follett readers will be frustrated, but anyone who has ever been moved by the splendors of a fine church will sink right into this highly detailed but fast-moving historical work—a novel about the people and skills needed to put up an eye-popping cathedral in the very unsettled days just before the ascension of Henry II. The cathedral is the brainchild of Philip, prior of the monastery at Kingsbridge, and Tom, an itinerant master mason. Philip, shrewd and ambitious but genuinely devout, sees it as a sign of divine agreement when his decrepit old cathedral burns on the night that Tom and his starving family show up seeking shelter. Actually, it's Tom's clever stepson Jack who has stepped in to carry out God's will by secretly torching the cathedral attic, but the effect is the same. Tom gets the commission to start the rebuilding—which is what he has wanted to do more than anything in his life. Meanwhile, however, the work is complicated greatly by local politics. There is a loathsome baron and his family who have usurped the local earldom and allied themselves with the powerful, cynical bishop—who is himself sinfully jealous of Philip's cathedral. There are the dispossessed heirs to earldom, a beautiful girl and her bellicose brother, both sworn to root out the usurpers. And there is the mysterious Ellen, Tom's second wife, who witnessed an ancient treachery that haunts the bishop, the priory, and the vile would-be earl. The great work is set back, and Tom is killed in a raid by the rivals. It falls to young Jack to finish the work. Thriller writing turns out to be pretty good training, since Follett's history moves like a fast freight train. Details are plenty, but they support rather than smother.
It's all quite entertaining and memorable.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1989
ISBN: 0451225244
Page Count: 973
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1989
BOOK TO SCREEN
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