With her usual expert precision and swiftly assured strokes, Rubens cuts away the dross and leaves us with baroque emotions...
Two British soldiers—one Jewish—are twisted up in espionage in British Palestine.
Never one for excess sentiment, Rubens (Nine Lives, 2004, etc.) allows emotions to flower somewhat in her sharp-edged, based-on-a-true-story romance that puts love and war at loggerheads. It’s 1947, and the British Mandate in Palestine is drawing to a close. International condemnation has grown louder as the British refuse to accept ship after ship of Jewish refugees, “turned back to the hell from which they had sailed.” A pair of British sergeants, David Millar and Will Griffiths, already conflicted about their morally dubious job of keeping the refugees from hitting the beach, are assigned an intelligence duty whereby they’ll gather information on the Jewish resistance, which is divided between the mostly nonviolent Hagannah movement and the terrorist Irgun group. Although easy duty at first (they get to wear civilian clothes and be their own bosses), the intelligence work starts to wear on David and Will in true shades-of-gray le Carré–fashion. Will realizes that one of the men he plays with at a jazz club may be in the resistance, and David, who falls in love with a Jewish woman, is torn that he mustn’t divulge his Jewish identity to her. Rubens zooms from her small, carefully laid-out tale of the sergeants to the larger backdrop of history, the brutal tit-for-tat campaign of Irgun bombings and British execution of Irgun prisoners, and the machinations of David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin, diametrically opposed resistance leaders. Just when the story seems to be settling into a rather easygoing routine, with the slow dissolution of the sergeants’ military ardor, they are sucked into a kidnapping scheme that will put their heads in nooses unless the British grant amnesty to Irgun operatives.
With her usual expert precision and swiftly assured strokes, Rubens cuts away the dross and leaves us with baroque emotions conveyed in a fine-tuned minimalism. Nerve-racking.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-349-11730-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Abacus/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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