A straightforward, engaging tale about finding a meaningful friendship late in life.
A novel focuses on a grieving widow who finds an unlikely second chance to embrace life.
This tale opens on a memorably stark note: the moment when 14-year-old Maureen Bower’s working-class father leaves their family and commits suicide. In a particularly jarring scene, she’s actually the one who discovers his body hanging from a tree in Highland Park. Naturally enough, the incident scars her psychologically, deepening her fear of abandonment until she meets a confident and high-spirited man named Frank Russo, who asks her to dance at the Cypress Avenue Roller Rink. Frank, a vibrant figure who, a character says, “could never be just another face in the crowd,” brings complicated vigor to Maureen’s life, and a chunk of the novel’s narrative details their relationship. When Frank dies, the wounds of losing her father are reopened, and she withdraws from society. Her unhealthy isolation is shattered by her deepening friendship with an unconventional woman named Doris Cantrell, whose outsized personality has developed as a response to her own psychological traumas while growing up. Doris is abrasive and outspoken, and although she’s kind in her gruff way, she shows little patience for Maureen’s habitual references to her long marriage to Frank and her ongoing bereavement. From the beginning, Maureen senses hidden dimensions in Doris. In direct and largely unadorned prose (that sometimes reads a trifle flat), Miceli (Amanda’s Room, 2012) skillfully charts the deepening of this odd friendship, with Doris and her own familial strife serving to draw Maureen out of a downward spiral that may well have had her following her father’s dark path. Instead of just wallowing in her sorrow, Maureen tries to figure out Doris’ troubled history: “I felt certain that underlying her anger was a deep pool of sadness. What life experiences had ingrained such hostility in my strange new friend?” The fine emotional gradations in the deepening friendship between the two women are smoothly handled and boldly venture into dramatic territory seldom dealt with in contemporary fiction.
A straightforward, engaging tale about finding a meaningful friendship late in life.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9976986-5-7
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Elm Hill
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2019
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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