An elegant, evocative debut, by a 26-year-old Australian storywriter.
It’s 1854, and a fragile 16-year-old girl is forced to leave England for Australia—an arduous voyage she is unlikely to survive.
Sarah Garnett, homesick, beset by nightmares and waking visions of the lover she longs for, is confined below decks with other unmarried women. Their life aboard the half-rotten ship is a delicately drawn parody of Victorian gentility: they fashion paper roses; promenade occasionally under the watchful eye of their stern chaperone; confide in each other, spy on each other, fight, and wonder about the unknown new world they sail toward. Madness is commonplace: the matron who guards what remains of their virtue has abandoned her own sons in New South Wales to pursue ghosts: her husband and baby died at sea and she can no longer live on land. A sailor who dared to cook and eat an albatross has gone completely insane, rolling in treacle and feathers and howling in misery. Disease is a constant threat, and an outbreak of typhus carries off more than one hapless victim. One of their number gives birth in secret to an illegitimate daughter, then dies within hours. The grieving young women open her trunk in search of mementos, and find only a moldering wedding dress. Manners and minds dissolve in the suffocating heat of the tropical latitudes, but Sarah clings to sanity by writing letter after letter to her parents, remembering her childhood idylls in the English countryside with her brother and sister—and with Richard, the cousin she was not permitted to marry. Imagining her pregnancy as a fish she swallowed that now trembles inside her, Sarah finally succumbs to a feverish madness of her own, lost in aqueous hallucinations. The irony of this is not lost on her: Mrs. Garnett, her mother, feared any contact with water, refusing even to drink it, but willingly set her daughter adrift on an ocean that the girl would cross but once.
An elegant, evocative debut, by a 26-year-old Australian storywriter.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-32160-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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