Strong characters and plotting—including a nifty final twist involving Jane—maintain the interest in a rather slowly paced...
On a lighthouse off the northern California coast, a young woman discovers her husband’s true nature—and her own—in Schwarz’s latest thoughtful exploration of family ties (So Long at the Fair, 2008, etc.).
Trudy is no longer sure she wants the conventional future her parents have mapped out for her in Milwaukee circa 1897. What’s the point of the education she’s receiving at the Milwaukee College for Females if all she’s going to do with it is make a perfect bourgeois home for Ernst, the family friend earmarked as her husband since childhood? When his cousin Oskar comes to visit, Trudy finds that this intellectual, iconoclastic dropout expresses her own restlessness and impatience. The next thing she knows, she’s married and en route with Oskar to a post as assistant lighthouse keeper that he expects will give him time for his electrical experiments. Their only company at the isolated lighthouse is the head keeper, Mr. Crawley, his wife and four children, and Mrs. Crawley’s brother Archie. These bluff, terse folks are not the sort Trudy is used to, though she does become fond of the children after she’s enlisted to give them lessons, especially youngest daughter Jane. But Trudy soon realizes that Oskar’s ambitions are unfocused and aimless, plus he proves to be arrogant and selfish as well. When his attention is drawn to a mysterious native woman the Crawleys call Helen, who lives in a nearby cave, Oskar sees her as his ticket to an academic career and ruthlessly plans to carry off Helen to a university. The fatal climax makes good use of the lighthouse’s rugged natural setting, which is well-described throughout, as is Trudy’s gradual maturation from a rebellious girl fooled by fancy words to a resourceful woman who thinks independently and can see value in people unlike herself.
Strong characters and plotting—including a nifty final twist involving Jane—maintain the interest in a rather slowly paced narrative.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8367-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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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