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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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