A lingering, often engaging tale about choices and consequences, despite its inconsistent pacing.
In Cecere’s debut novel, two friends, both the offspring of immigrants, grow up in Pittsburgh during the waning years of the Depression and choose very different paths in an America riddled with prejudice.
In 1926, the eponymous Avenue is a two-mile stretch of road in Pittsburgh that demarcates the Italian enclave of the city. The houses are close together, poverty is a constant, the steel mill and the railroad are the major employers, and strong family ties and traditions hold it all together. Everybody knows everybody else, and it’s within these comforting but sometimes-suffocating confines that Donato “Danny” Castle Forte and Francis “Frankie” Collizio are born and raised. Frankie belongs to the street; it’s the source of his inner strength, his external power, and his rise to prominence within the local mob. He’s never confused about who he is or where he belongs. But the novel belongs to Danny, who’s conflicted about his identity and whose aspirations stretch far beyond the Avenue. He’s driven to put the limitations imposed by his Italian heritage behind him, and each decision he makes is designed to separate him further from his roots. Unlike Frankie, however, he never really fits in anywhere, despite his efforts, and at times, he seems to exist in an emotional vacuum. Debut author Cecere makes an impressive entrance with this poignant, character-driven novel. His generally fluid prose occasionally displays a raw grittiness, as in chilling passages that describe World War II battle scenes or the brutality toward African-Americans on the Avenue. Also, his portrayal of the immigrant and first-generation Italian experience is illuminating. However, he also has a confusing tendency to speed up the story’s timeline, sometimes within a single chapter. Although the 1930s and ’40s settings are clearly identifiable, there are minimal cultural reference points to enrich the background in the following decades. Most of the salient action takes place in the earlier years, so these final chapters feel a bit rushed—more like summary than narrative.
A lingering, often engaging tale about choices and consequences, despite its inconsistent pacing.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4809-6336-8
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Rosedog Books
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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