Well-crafted, sophisticated inspirational fiction.
Two classmates at a convent boarding school in Kansas in 1910 find themselves in danger when one girl’s mother is missing and someone doesn’t want her found.
In Mueller’s debut novel, Sophiny Mumm and Antoinette Dominguez are students at Mount St. Mary’s Academy. A missionary visits and tells of his recent trip to Brazil. Sophiny has a crush on him and tells Antoinette, who has a secret as well: She plans to elope soon. Before leaving, Antoinette convinces Sophiny to trade trunks with her and secures a promise Sophiny won’t look in Antoinette’s unless “it cannot be prevented.” One sleepless night, Sophiny looks outside and sees a female depart in the dark, embrace a male and leave. When Antoinette doesn’t show for morning chapel and breakfast, Sophiny assumes her friend eloped but keeps her secret; Antoinette promised she’d keep in touch. Sophiny is already fatherless, and when her long-ill mother dies, she is summoned home to help her four brothers on the family farm. She writes to Sister Louise at the convent inquiring of her friend, but there’s been no news from Antoinette. Finally convinced to investigate Antoinette’s trunk, Sophiny finds clothes, cash and a notebook revealing what really happened. As heir to her late father’s fortune, Antoinette was sought by his partner, Stillman, a man she mistrusted and feared was keeping her beloved mother away. Antoinette is determined to locate her mother. Sophiny enlists her brothers and a new friend to help find Antoinette and Stillman, a particularly elegant villain. Slow-moving initially, the plot takes wing when Antoinette’s true quest is revealed. The writing is often lovely, as when Sophiny is on a wagon headed back to the farm: “The sweet smell of new grass after spring rains was heaven’s best gift to the earth, she thought. The quails and meadowlarks were nesting. Their mating calls came clear, sweet, and insistent.” Some scenes are told through Antoinette’s diary entries, giving a unique voice to her side of events and supplying missing pieces of the puzzle.
Well-crafted, sophisticated inspirational fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1449779566
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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