The author sews her varied themes, characters, and surprises into a seamless narrative that is essential reading for anyone...
A debut historical novel explores love, war, mystery, and magic.
Queen Mathilda of Flanders, dead since the Norman Conquest, is a spirit awaiting a new life. In 1923, she becomes Alenka Kaminski’s daughter. Unfortunately, she dies in childbirth, and Mathilda is forced to become Goldye Finkelstein, daughter of a woman no spirit would inhabit. So begins Gaal’s adult fairy tale. The action alternates between Nazi-occupied Warsaw, where Goldye works her magic, and modern-day California, where Maude Wasserman frets over her finances, aging mother, pregnant daughter, and life in general. Before the Nazi invasion, Goldye, a Jew living in the Warsaw ghetto, goes to widower Jan Kaminski’s (Alenka’s husband) shop for thread to sew the dreams of her imaginary friend, Mathilda. Jan, an Aryan Pole, befriends Goldye and they discover the dreams she sews come true after she embroiders a wedding dress. Her reputation grows and young Warsaw women flock to Jan’s shop for Goldye’s wedding gowns. Eventually, she falls in love with Lev, a Resistance fighter. She begins to sew hummingbirds that inspire people to aid the struggle, leading to a deadly cat-and-mouse game with the Nazis. Meanwhile, in California, Maude discovers that her mother, Bea, a woman lost to Alzheimer’s who never sewed in her life, has stitched a replica of the Bayeux Tapestry, a masterpiece from Mathilda’s time. Gaal’s delightfully sardonic and neuroses-filled portrait of Maude is in perfect counterpoint to the people of Goldye’s world. The author’s beautifully written narrative is filled with wit, action, mythical allusion (“She felt like Sisyphus”), and characters so real that readers will feel they know them personally. Gaal’s powers of description in this poignant tale are evidenced in her depiction of the Bayeux replica: “The needlework appeared to be a story told in wool. A hunter-green horse reared. A helmeted soldier—chestnut leggings and silver mail—sat atop a mauve horse, urging it forward and thrusting a glinting wool sword into an eggshell wooly sky.”
The author sews her varied themes, characters, and surprises into a seamless narrative that is essential reading for anyone who loves elegant writing.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73258-960-5
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Anchor House Pubishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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