by Deborah Lawrenson ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 24, 2014
Readers who wade through the slowly paced narrative may appreciate its rich historical detail and lavish descriptions of the...
In three loosely connected novellas, Lawrenson (The Lantern, 2011) has created a tale of love and mystery with shifting characters, eras, locations and tones.
Award-winning landscape designer Ellie Brooke is on a ferry to Porquerolles, a French Mediterranean island, when a young man goes overboard in an apparent suicide. That event sets the tone for her brief 2013 visit. Ellie has been asked to restore a memorial garden, but she's gripped with foreboding as a mysterious man appears and disappears and nightmares invade her sleep. Forced to stay the night at her host’s estate, she meets the garden’s owner, a crazy old woman; decides to reject the job; then unwisely returns the next day to retrieve a lost item. Years earlier, during the closing months of World War II, 20-ish blind woman Marthe Lincel lives with the Musset family and works in their perfume and soap refinery. The Nazis have occupied Provence, but the Musset family is allowed to continue production. Although many consider them Nazi sympathizers, they actually serve in the Resistance. Putting her Braille expertise to use, Marthe joins the movement, and when a key member fails to return from a mission, Marthe volunteers to replace her. Her courageous actions—and a chance meeting with an American soldier the Musset family is trying to move out of the country—change her future. Also participating in the war effort, Iris Nightingale is a junior intelligence officer in London who finds herself in close contact with operatives flying into and out of France. She becomes romantically involved with Frenchman Xavier Descours, who then goes on a mission and never returns. Obsessed with uncovering information about his life and fate, Iris searches for answers and, years later, discovers the truth.
Readers who wade through the slowly paced narrative may appreciate its rich historical detail and lavish descriptions of the French coastline, but the revelations that weave the three stories together are anticlimactic and disappointing.Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-227966-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
Share your opinion of this book
More by Deborah Lawrenson
BOOK REVIEW
by Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017
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
Share your opinion of this book
More About This Book
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
Awards & Accolades
Likes
26
Our Verdict
GET IT
New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
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
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.