Undeniably entertaining but as slow-moving as a steamy Macedonian summer.
The co-author of a novel about the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands now turns her attention to scandals besetting a small Depression-era West Virginia town.
Barrows, who co-wrote the surprise bestseller The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2008), takes a similarly panoramic approach to the insular hamlet of Macedonia, West Virginia, using multiple points of view with epistolary interludes. It’s 1938, and the owner of Macedonia’s primary employer, the American Everlasting sock factory, has just laid off 44 workers over the objection of Sol McKubin, longtime plant manager. This would never have happened had the Romeyns, once Macedonia’s most prominent family, not lost control of Everlasting after the original factory was destroyed by arson in 1920. The novel’s main source of suspense is the mystery surrounding that disaster. Vause Hamilton was alleged to have set the fire, killing himself and wrecking the future of his best friend, Felix Romeyn. Presumably the motive was theft: the safe was robbed and some of the money disappeared. Sol claimed Felix and Vause were in cahoots, but Sol’s motives are suspect: not only was he envious of the two golden boys, Vause and Felix, but he loved Felix’s sister, Jottie, who had eyes only for Vause. Now Jottie, who has never married, is raising Felix’s young daughters, Willa and Bird, the products of a short-lived marriage, while feckless but charming Felix disappears for long stretches. Willa, a whip-smart tomboy in the Scout Finch mold, is alarmed at her father’s flirtation with Layla, a Washington, D.C., debutante who is boarding at Jottie’s house and writing a history of Macedonia for the WPA Writers’ Project. The novel is too long: an initial section of exposition regarding Layla, a relatively superfluous character, could have been streamlined, and italicized flashbacks abound. The ironic contrast between Macedonia’s official and actual history is played to the hilt, and this unique corner of Americana—a mélange of Yankee and Southern cultures—is re-created as vividly as the very different Anglo-European milieu of Guernsey.
Undeniably entertaining but as slow-moving as a steamy Macedonian summer.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-34294-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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