A highly readable telling of a royal fall from grace.
Biofic about Elizabeth of Bohemia and her thwarted ambitions.
Canadian novelist Elias has painstakingly researched this portrait of a Stuart royal whose obscurity is undeserved. At 16, Elizabeth, daughter of James I of England, is wedded to Frederick, Count Palatine of the Rhine. James sees Frederick’s candidacy for the throne of Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic) as a way to make Protestant inroads in a Europe dominated by the Catholic Hapsburgs. Part 1 takes place during the couple’s engagement period, through which we get a vivid glimpse of the dysfunctionality of James’ court. James and the queen spend lavishly, he on building projects, she on elaborate masques staged by Ben Jonson and other courtiers of dubious talent. Elizabeth’s beloved brother, Henry, the Prince of Wales, is a patron of the arts with better taste: He funds Shakespeare’s productions. As the future king, Henry might have restored order, fiscal and otherwise—but he dies tragically and somewhat suspiciously. Elizabeth nurses a secret crush on Sir Walter Raleigh, an older man whom her father has clapped in the Tower. Elias’ use of language to re-create the period is striking. In both cadence and vocabulary, Shakespearian parlance is not so much mimicked as suggested: for example, “There’s something to be said for vulgarity if it should serve to subvert pretense.” But long stretches of dialogue, however sparkling, drag out exposition to frustrating lengths. As the scene shifts to Frederick’s ancestral castle in Heidelberg, readers will miss the intrigue and backbiting at James’ court. Elizabeth is more or less content with her loveless but courteous marriage, and she begins to produce children at an alarming rate. (She is the first to be alarmed.) Elizabeth's political machinations on Frederick’s behalf backfire catastrophically. Far from viewing herself as a pawn, she takes responsibility for strategic missteps, mainly allowing the destruction of Catholic artifacts after Frederick is crowned King of Bohemia and underestimating the hostility of the Holy Roman Empire to the Protestant interlopers.
A highly readable telling of a royal fall from grace.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-77041-463-1
Page Count: 360
Publisher: ECW Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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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