An amusing, romantic, and uplifting YA tale.
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
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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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