The 1950s setting, the pellucid prose, and the propulsive plot make this very steamy debut novel about morality and desire...
This young couple's September honeymoon in Cape May got so boring they almost went home early. If only.
Henry and Effie got married a few months after high school graduation in their 1950s Georgia hometown and have come to while away two weeks in Effie's uncle's house, the site of fondly remembered summer visits all through her childhood. Unfortunately, Effie "had not understood what 'off-season' meant,” and Henry's no help—he's never been north of Atlanta. Sadly, the "old clerk at the grocer’s seemed as happy to see them as they were to see him." At least they have the delicious problem of losing their virginities, and then their inhibitions, with the help of Uncle George's well-stocked liquor cabinet. But after several days, the sad, lonely feel of the town starts to get to them. They are planning to leave a week early when they notice lights on down the street and decide to stop by. The effusive woman who answers the door turns out to be someone Effie knows, a friend of her much older cousin—actually, someone she hated. But before she can get Henry out of there, gin is being poured, dinner is being served, and a gang of people, including everyone from older men in tuxedos, beatniks, Coast Guard cadets, and a naked toddler, is boogeying it up in the living room. Higher on gin and excitement than she's ever been in her life, Effie decides running into Clara Strauss was not such a bad thing after all. The couple becomes completely infatuated with this decadent, sexy, cosmopolitan crowd, in the process falling down a rabbit hole with life-changing consequences. Deceptively relaxed and simple at first, the novel seems to be an easygoing trip down Memory Lane. It soon reveals itself as a swirling vortex of psychological suspense with insights about marriage that recall writers like Margot Livesey and Alice Munro.
The 1950s setting, the pellucid prose, and the propulsive plot make this very steamy debut novel about morality and desire feel like a classic.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29715-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
Constructed with delicacy, lyricism, and care, Hertmans’ novel still feels occasionally static.
A Christian woman and a Jewish man fall in love in medieval France.
In 1088, a Christian girl of Norman descent falls in love with the son of a rabbi. They run away together, to disastrous effect: Her father sends knights after them, and though they flee to a small southern village where they spend a few happy years, their budding family is soon decimated by a violent wave of First Crusaders on their way to Jerusalem. The girl, whose name becomes Hamoutal when she converts to Judaism, winds up roaming the world. Hertmans’ (War and Turpentine, 2016, etc.) latest novel is based on a true story: The Cairo Genizah, a trove of medieval manuscripts preserved in an Egyptian synagogue, contained an account of Hamoutal’s plight. Hamoutal makes up about half of Hertmans’ novel; the other half is consumed by Hertmans’ own interest in her story. Whenever he can, he follows her journey: from Rouen, where she grew up, to Monieux, where she and David Todros—her Jewish husband—made a brief life for themselves, and all the way to Cairo, and back. “Knowing her life story and its tragic end,” Hertmans writes, “I wish I could warn her of what lies ahead.” The book has a quiet intimacy to it, and in his descriptions of landscape and travel, Hertmans’ prose is frequently lovely. In Narbonne, where David’s family lived, Hertmans describes “the cool of the paving stones in the late morning, the sound of doves’ wings flapping in the immaculate air.” But despite the drama of Hamoutal’s story, there is a static quality to the book, particularly in the sections where Hertmans describes his own travels. It’s an odd contradiction: Hertmans himself moves quickly through the world, but his book doesn’t quite move quickly enough.
Constructed with delicacy, lyricism, and care, Hertmans’ novel still feels occasionally static.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4708-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Although this novel’s reach exceeds its grasp, it is a necessary book.
On an island off the South Korean coast, an ancient guild of women divers reckons with the depredations of modernity from 1938 to 2008 in See's (The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, 2017, etc.) latest novel.
The women divers of Jeju Island, known as haenyeo, don't display the usual female subservience. Empowered by the income they derive from their diving, harvesting seafood to consume and sell, haenyeo are heads of households; their husbands mind the children and do menial chores. Young-sook, See’s first-person narrator and protagonist, tells of her family and her ill-fated friendship with Mi-ja, who, rescued from neglectful relatives by Sun-sil, Young-sook’s mother, is initiated into the diving collective headed by Sun-sil. The girls grow up together, dive together, and go on lucrative assignments in the freezing waters near Vladivostok, Russia. They are also married off together, Mi-ja to Sang-mun, who, as World War II progresses, is enriched by collaborating with the Japanese, and Young-sook to Jun-bu, a neighbor and childhood playmate. The novel’s first half is anecdotal and a little tedious as the minutiae of the haenyeo craft are explored: free diving, pre-wetsuit diving garb, and sumbisori, the art of held breath. As two tragedies prove, the most prized catches are the riskiest: octopus and abalone. See did extensive research with primary sources to detail not only the haenyeo traditions, but the mass murders on Jeju beginning in 1948, which were covered up for decades by the South Korean government. As Jeju villages are decimated, Young-sook loses half her family and also, due to a terrible betrayal, her friendship with Mi-ja. The tangled web of politics and tyranny, not to mention the inaction of U.N. and American occupiers leading up to the massacres, deserves its own work, perhaps nonfiction. In the context of such horrors, the novel’s main source of suspense, whether Young-sook can forgive Mi-ja, seems beside the point.
Although this novel’s reach exceeds its grasp, it is a necessary book.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5485-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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