A somber and important novel highlighting the experiences of German Jewish women during the Holocaust.
A missing piece of family history is memorialized in Suchman’s historical novel, a tribute to the lives lost during the Holocaust.
The book opens with a nonfiction prologue: In 2018, the author and her husband, Bruce, missed their connecting flight through Frankfurt to Washington, D.C. With 12 hours to kill, they explored the city. Bruce’s father, Curtis, fled the region at 17 to escape the Nazis; the couple found a plaque (a stolpersteine, known in English as a stumbling stone) dedicated to Emma and Selma Heppenheimer, Bruce’s great-grandmother and great-aunt. But missing from the stone was the name of another great aunt: Alice. It is here that Suchman moves into the novel proper, using her extensive research into Alice’s life to fictionalize her story. Beginning in 1920 and ending during World War II, Suchman’s narrative covers more than two decades as she imagines how this Jewish woman endured her experiences as Nazi ideology and politics took hold of Germany and controlled and suppressed so many aspects of her life. Readers first meet Alice in Nuremberg on the eve of her wedding to Ludwig Adler. A graduate of the Nuremberg Arts and Crafts School with dreams of opening her own fashion studio, Alice begins an apprenticeship in a handbag factory, and it is here that her first true experiences with antisemitism begin. Suchman writes of Alice’s experiences in a powerful way; readers see a young woman come of age and find her place in the world, unable to find firm footing because of the events taking place around her. Short, emphatic statements, such as Alice’s reaction to discovering the identity of a co-worker leaving derogatory notes for her (“surely, he couldn’t hate her if he actually knew her”), emphasize the horrific dehumanization of ordinary people just for being Jewish. Extremely readable with close attention paid to both wider historical and intimate family details, Suchman’s tale serves as a monument in words.
A somber and important novel highlighting the experiences of German Jewish women during the Holocaust.Pub Date: May 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781685134105
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.
An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work.
At the end of Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey departed Ireland for the second and final time—headed back to New York and the Italian American husband she had secretly married after first traveling there for work. In her hometown of Enniscorthy, she left behind Jim Farrell, a young man she’d fallen in love with during her visit, and the inevitable gossip about her conduct. Tóibín’s 11th novel introduces readers to Eilis 20 years later, in 1976, still married to Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbia with their two teenage children. But Eilis’ seemingly placid existence is disturbed when a stranger confronts her, accusing Tony of having an affair with his wife—now pregnant—and threatening to leave the baby on their doorstep. “She’d known men like this in Ireland,” Tóibín writes. “Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house.” This shock sends Eilis back to Enniscorthy for a visit—or perhaps a longer stay. (Eilis’ motives are as inscrutable as ever, even to herself.) She finds the never-married Jim managing his late father’s pub; unbeknownst to Eilis (and the town), he’s become involved with her widowed friend Nancy, who struggles to maintain the family chip shop. Eilis herself appears different to her old friends: “Something had happened to her in America,” Nancy concludes. Although the novel begins with a soap-operatic confrontation—and ends with a dramatic denouement, as Eilis’ fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton—the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s.
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781476785110
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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