A powerful if flawed portrayal of the Holocaust’s barbarity and one man’s will to survive.
In a grisly fictional memoir, a Polish Jew recounts his years in the Warsaw ghetto and Nazi concentration camps.
First-time author Cornell’s novel gives an account of one man’s horrific experiences during World War II. As a boy, Henryk Frankowski and his family were hauled off by German authorities, first to the Warsaw ghetto and then to concentration camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau. Enduring dehumanizing scenes of utter degradation, Henryk grew into a young man during his four years in the camps, as the authorities separated him from his parents and siblings. He and his fellow prisoners suffered monstrous brutality: Guards killed or beat them for the slightest offense or for none at all; they worked as slave laborers under intolerable conditions, subsisting on meager rations of revolting swill. Rats and prisoners fed on corpses of dead inmates; the crematoria couldn’t keep up with the swelling stacks of cadavers. Crafted in the form of Henryk’s memoir as an old man in the U.S., the novel creates powerful images of incredible viciousness and, in reflection, of human strength and courage. The narrative has many weaknesses, however. For instance, the device of Henryk’s mother’s ring, which she gives to him to show the power of love and family, feels contrived. Characterization is weak: Cornell doesn’t give readers a full portrait of Henryk’s mother beyond the love one would expect in any normal mother-child relationship, or of his siblings and father. Though the writing is serviceable and spare, anachronistic words don’t fit the era or the narrator: “hassle,” “win-win,” and “spacey” have too much of a hollow, contemporary American ring. More dialogue would have helped flesh out the novel’s characters, too. Readers know little about Henryk’s family, fellow prisoners or overseers beyond the suffering of the first two and the brutality of the latter. By the time Henryk emerges from the camps at war’s end, weighing only 68 pounds, the book has shown much more about the camps in general than about his compatriots. Still, the sheer inhumanity and cruelty deserve retelling.
A powerful if flawed portrayal of the Holocaust’s barbarity and one man’s will to survive.Pub Date: July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490311487
Page Count: 346
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.
A dramatic, complex imagining of the origins of Stonehenge.
In about 2500 B.C.E. on the Great Plain, Seft and his family collect flints in a mine. He dislikes the work, and the motherless lad hates the abuse he gets from his father and brothers. He leaves them and arrives at a wooden monument where sacred events such as the Midsummer Rite take place. There are also circles of stones that help predict equinoxes, solstices, even eclipses. This is a world where the customary greeting is “May the Sun God smile on you,” and everyone is a year older on Midsummer Day. Except for a priestess or two, no one can count beyond fingers and toes—to indicate 30, they show both hands, point to both feet, then show both hands again. Casual sex is common, and sex between women is less common but not taboo. Joia, a young woman who becomes a priestess, wonders about her sexuality. After a fire destroys the Monument, she leads a bold effort to rebuild it in stone. To please the gods, they must haul 10 giant stones from distant Stony Valley. Of course neither machinery nor roads exist, so the difficulties are extraordinary. Although the project has its detractors, hundreds of able-bodied people are willing to help. Craftspeople known as cleverhands construct a sled and a road, and they make the rope to wrap around the stones. Many, many others pull. And pull. Meanwhile, the three principal groups—farmers, woodlanders, and herders—all have their separate interests. There is talk of war, which Joia has never seen in her lifetime. Soon it seems inevitable that the powerful farmers will not only start one but win it, unless heroes like Seft and Joia can come up with a creative plan. But there is also the matter of love for Joia in this well-plotted and well-told yarn. The story has a lot of characters from multiple tribes, and they can be hard to keep track of. A page in the front of the book listing who’s who would be helpful.
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781538772775
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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