by Christina Hergenrader ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2017
An amusing, romantic, and uplifting YA tale.
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In Hergenrader’s (Love Rules, 2016, etc.) YA novel, a young woman becomes the summer director at a Christian summer camp that seems to be on its last legs.
Poppi Savot, 19, dropped out of her freshman semester at the University of Minnesota, distracted by grief over her mother’s death from breast cancer. Her well-meaning father is struggling with alcoholism, so she needs to find a full-time job to get by. Recalling happy memories of her Christian summer camp, she finds an opening as a summer director at a similar place, Camp Eden in Southern California; she muses that it’ll be warm there and also “far from home and memories and failure.” When she arrives at the camp, she feels immediately at home, but the executive director, Bryan Simes, gives her bad news: Camp Eden is struggling financially and will close by the end of that summer, as it’s being sold to a corporation. Poppi could go home, but she feels that Eden is where she’s meant to be. She finds new allies in the 17-year-old camp counselors and particularly Jake Bass, a college sophomore who’s in charge of the male staff. As Poppi comes to terms with the difficulties and pleasures of her new responsibilities, she mourns her mother and struggles with her faith: “I feel about God the way I feel about my own dad. He seems unreliable.” Jake is intriguing, she thinks, but he might turn out to be unreliable, too. Still, despite the odds, Poppi and her helpers do their best to try to save the camp. Hergenrader nicely captures the friendships, games, problems, and atmosphere of summer camps, Christian ones in particular, such as when counselors groan at the thought of another God’s-eye craft project. Characters give thoughtful consideration to their religious beliefs, and Hergenrader does an especially good job of tracing Poppi’s evolving understanding of God’s will. The characters lack diversity, but they do exhibit a range of economic backgrounds. There’s some sentimentality in the novel’s idyllic presentation of summer camps in general, and there’s little suspense regarding whether things will work out in the end. Importantly, though, Poppi shows personal and spiritual maturity as she becomes willing to accept the possibility of failure.
An amusing, romantic, and uplifting YA tale.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7586-5713-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Concordia Publishing House
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by C.S. Lewis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1942
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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