A well-crafted tale about trauma and miracles.
In this Holocaust novel, a man learns that one of his sisters, long thought to be dead, may be living in a Greek convent.
Brooklyn, 1990. Dr. Nicky Covo is a psychiatrist and widower attempting to help his patients deal with their problems while keeping his own from spilling over into his practice. He’s also a Holocaust survivor haunted by the loss of his entire family at Auschwitz when he was a teenager fighting with the Greek partisans against the Nazi occupation. As he’s leaving his office for the night, Nicky finds a letter from Abbess Fevronia, the head of the Holy Monastery of St. Vlassios in Inousa, Greece. The abbess has reason to believe that Sister Theodora, a taciturn nun who has lived at the convent since 1944, may in fact be one of Nicky’s sisters. At first, Nicky assumes the letter to be a ploy: “He’d heard about missing persons scams, promises to reunite the victim—a sucker—with a long-lost loved one in return for a small, or not so small, payment. He was too smart to fall for something like that.” And yet he can’t shake the feeling—or perhaps simply the hope—that the nun might be his sister Kalli. After his cellist daughter is hospitalized following a schizophrenic episode and Helen, a long-gone friend, reenters his life, Nicky decides he must satisfy his curiosity and return to Greece—even if doing so means confronting the past that he’s long sought to escape. The narrative switches back and forth between Nicky’s present and Fevronia’s experiences with Theodora over the latter half of the 20th century. Berger’s prose is understated and tailored to the interior lives of his characters: “It was past midnight when Nicky got back to his apartment. The long drive along icy highways, through poor visibility, left him shaking. In bed, he couldn’t relax, excited by the time with Helen and the idea that he was falling in love again.” Sometimes predictable, sometimes surprising, the novel is an exploration of faith that manages to challenge and satisfy in equal doses.
A well-crafted tale about trauma and miracles.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68433-559-6
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
The mystery plot and the Italian idyl both play supporting roles in this fairy tale for grownups.
Scottoline’s latest links her great love of Italy with her long record of female-centered crime fiction.
Julia Pritzker has a presentiment that something terrible is around the corner, but she never imagines just how terrible: When her husband, Philadelphia attorney Mike Shallette, tries to protect her from a man who grabs her designer bag, he gets stabbed to death before her eyes. Julia’s grief becomes laced with guilt when she realizes that her daily horoscope had predicted a calamity she’s now convinced she could have prevented. The news from Italian attorney Massimiliano Lombardi that his late client has left her millions in cash and an estate worth nearly as much again doesn’t comfort her, but it does provide distraction—especially since she’s never heard of Emilia Rossi and has no idea why she’s been chosen as her heir. Since Julia, adopted at an early age by a couple who’ve been dead for years, wonders if Emilia might have been her biological grandmother, she travels to Chianti in hope of recovering some of Emilia’s DNA. Unfortunately, caretakers Anna Mattia Vesta and Piero Fano have burned all of Emilia’s clothing and personal items on her orders, so there’s nothing left to test. Growing convinced that the stars are directing her and that her history is rooted in Emilia’s decrepit house, Julia turns down repeated offers for the property and resolves to secure evidence confirming the relationship between Emilia and her. Now all she has to do is protect herself from the shadowy figures tracking and following her and recover from a series of vivid, hallucinatory nightmares that seem to be the cost of claiming her heritage.
The mystery plot and the Italian idyl both play supporting roles in this fairy tale for grownups.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781538769997
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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