A playful novel of migration, music, and the inescapable violence of history.
A magical piece of wood becomes an instrument of unpredictable power in Siegel’s historical fantasy novel.
In 1908, a massive, mysterious explosion in the Siberian forest leads a curious tavern owner to investigate. At the center of the devastation, he finds a single tree still standing—a large spruce—which the man promptly cuts down, intending to harvest its unusually strong heartwood. Back in his village, the wood attracts attention for its pleasant, spicy fragrance, and for its even stranger property: Proximity to the wood seems to make men better lovers. A section of the heartwood ends up with a Romani trader; years later, the log is smuggled out of Moscow with a family fleeing the Bolsheviks. Partially burned for fuel in Spain, it’s eventually discovered by a Sephardic luthier from Barcelona, who presents it to his son, 16-year-old Gaspar de Castillo, as practice material for the construction of his first guitar. Gaspar, who was born the same month and year as the Siberian explosion, has been trained since boyhood to play his family’s Ladino music, but he also loves American jazz. The first time Gaspar plays the guitar he makes from the wood, a bolt of blue electricity leaps from its strings. When he plays it for an audience, its amorous effects cause listeners to lose their inhibitions. As Europe descends into the Second World War, Gaspar escapes to America, where an old friend of his father’s, Walter Fischer, gives him a job repairing instruments. Gaspar begins playing for passers-by in Central Park, delighting humans and birds alike and attracting admirers both benevolent (like jazz star Charlie Parker) and otherwise (like gangster Meyer Lansky). Gaspar finally strikes up a romance with fellow immigrant Minette, a Romani flamenco dancer he has desired since his boyhood in Barcelona, but his American dream soon becomes far more complicated than he ever could have predicted.
Siegel’s folktale-like narration never gets too close to Gaspar’s or the other characters’ interior lives, giving readers the sense that a gulf of history exists between them and the people in the story. The author has a talent for crafting memorable moments and lines of dialogue that feel genuinely time-worn, as when Gaspar’s music teacher, the silver-haired maestro Gustavo Moravia, cautions the boy that “Real music comes from the silences between notes, not how many notes you play. Think of the silences when a lark sings as the sun rises.” The appearances of historical figures like Parker and Lansky makes for good fun, though Gaspar’s New York sometimes feels more like a movie set simulacrum than a real place, with people exclaiming “Fuhgeddaboudit” and offering the young immigrant egg creams. (“The vendor handed him a drink, fizzy and sweet. Why don’t I taste egg or cream? Gaspar asked himself.”) The novel doesn’t play on readers’ heartstrings quite as masterfully as Gaspar plays his guitar, but the journey is a pleasant one, capturing that indescribable magic with which music seems to shape the world around us.
A playful novel of migration, music, and the inescapable violence of history.Pub Date: July 5, 2023
ISBN: 9798218191535
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
