An earnest but uneven guide to an oft-overlooked period of Croatian history.
A young Croatian girl dreams of America in this debut historical novel.
In this book, Raguz tells the story of Marta Tomic, a girl growing up in the Croatian city of Vukovar during the reign of Yugoslavian dictator Josip Tito in the 1970s. Her father loses his job due to his involvement in the Croatian Spring political movement years earlier, and her family is under constant scrutiny because of their Roman Catholic faith and refusal to join the Communist Party. But Marta finds solace in watching American movies and acting in school plays. When she’s chosen to participate in a student exchange program in New York City, she’s overjoyed. She’s even more excited when she meets her host family and finds that the parents have a handsome son, Ian. But even in America, life is not all sunshine and rainbows. The daughter in her host family becomes jealous of Marta’s acting talent, and the father is stern and sometimes downright abusive to his children. And more conflicts await Marta when she returns to Croatia, as a change in regimes threatens to spark a war between the Communists and the nationalists. Throughout the many changes in her country and her own life, she keeps up her love for and connection to the U.S.—and to one American man in particular—while struggling to cultivate her talent for the theater. The narrative moves along at a quick pace despite the book’s length. Marta makes a sympathetic protagonist, and when she and her loved ones are in danger, it’s easy to care about what happens to them. One weakness of the story, though, is that it spends too much time on exposition laying out the political climate of Croatia and how Marta’s family feels about it and not enough time building scenes that show the characters’ internal conflicts. The dialogue also tends to feature many sentences beginning with “as you know” and such on-the-nose statements as “What’s going to happen to me?” uttered by characters in immediate, mortal danger.
An earnest but uneven guide to an oft-overlooked period of Croatian history.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 414
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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