Perhaps quality of expression is diminished in translation, but Gelasimov’s coming-of-age story grows old quickly.
During the final days of World War II, a 12-year-old boy dreams of becoming a soldier in this English translation of Russian author Gelasimov’s (The Lying Year, 2013, etc.) award-winning coming-of-age novel.
Petka is a precocious boy whose vivid imagination compensates for his reality. Shunned by many in Razgulyaevka for his illegitimacy, he’s a target for bullies and spends most days on the receiving end of his Granny Daria’s stick for his boisterous behavior. But to Petka, verbal and physical abuse is merely part of his normal day, and he shrugs it off while plotting boyish fun: caring for a wolf cub, lobbing cow patties at “enemy” targets, stowing away in a barrel to steal alcohol and befriending officers at a nearby POW camp. His one friend from the village is Valerka, a weak and sickly boy who deserts Petka whenever he’s allowed to join the bullies. While Petka engages in childish activities (which begin as mildly humorous but evolve into Dennis-the-Menace type antics that can best be described as idiotic), Japanese POW Miyanaga Hirotaro secretly writes a journal detailing his family history in hopes his sons in Nagasaki will someday read it. A man of honor descended from discredited samurais, Hirotaro’s often punished for alleged escape attempts when he leaves camp in search of herbs to minister to the wounded and ill. He tries to warn soldiers about the dangers of the nearby mine but is ridiculed for his efforts. On one of Hirotaro’s forays, he crosses paths with Petka, an encounter that’s fortuitous for the boy and painful for the prisoner. Hirotaro triggers a turning point in young Petka’s life: He begins to question actions, develop his own beliefs and take responsibility for the well-beings of others. Like his young protagonist, Gelasimov’s narrative launches with manic energy and quickly scatters in a thousand directions. Although fragmented prose may be representative of a young boy’s thought processes, the author fails to clearly connect events and characters and incorporate the elements into a credible, satisfactory conclusion.
Perhaps quality of expression is diminished in translation, but Gelasimov’s coming-of-age story grows old quickly.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61109-073-4
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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