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SMUGGLED

Name: SMUGGLED
Author: Christina Shea
ISBN: 978-0-8021-7086-6

by Christina Shea ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2011

A satisfying read.

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A novel about identity set over the course of four decades, from the author of Moira’s Crossing (2000).

In 1943, on a train in Hungary, 5-year-old Éva, daughter of Eszter and György, slips into a flour sack. She steps out in Romania as Anca, her parents now Auntie Kati and Uncle Ilie. Had she stayed in Hungary, she surely would have died during World War II; Eszter dies on her way to Auschwitz and György by his own hand, of a broken heart. Shea does an excellent job of capturing the individuality at the heart of a war that most readers know only from textbook summaries. Kati handles her new charge with a combination of distance and nurturing. The scenes with Miss Pharmacist, Anca’s first friend and her first real betrayer in Romania, add complexity to the adult world without compromising the novel’s focus on young Anca. In her new home in Romania, she pushes back against her name change, “such an ugly name—like glass breaking," but we also see her start to mature. Anca goes on to lead an intense life, maintaining her secret identity for half a century while meeting others who also carry secrets sprung from the changing times: another secret Jew, a closeted homosexual, a back-alley abortion doctor, a fetishist, a power-abusing coach in the burgeoning European table tennis world. Her favorite childhood story is about a prideful princess and a resourceful, self-aware swineherd. Throughout these pages, she becomes both.

A satisfying read.

Pub Date: July 1, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-8021-7086-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Black Cat/Grove

Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.

Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946

ISBN: 0452277507

Page Count: 114

Publisher: Harcourt, Brace

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
GEORGE ORWELL
by George Orwell ; edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
DIARIES
by George Orwell & edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
ALL ART IS PROPAGANDA
by George Orwell

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.