An insightful and earnest collection of stories centered on a sanctuary city.
The third of Clovis’ (Six Doors Down, 2017, etc.) Princeton-centric novels uses time travel to examine how discrimination has changed or stayed relatively the same.
A recurring theme in the author’s trilogy is synchronicity, Carl Jung’s notion of “meaningful coincidence.” In her latest installment, Clovis addresses the possibility of traveling to the past and future via consciousness. This opens up discussions on crucial issues, both in their current state and throughout history. For example, there’s been an increase in anti-Semitic attacks since the start of the Trump administration, hate-fueled incidents the author equates with the Holocaust. “Learning the truth of the past and educating future generations,” she notes, “will begin the process of change.” She drives home her point by delving into the concept of parallel worlds. February 2017 global protests to stop the U.S. government from denying Syrian refugees entry is a potential reflection of historical change; in other words, a parallel world without the demonstrations could be considerably worse. As in Clovis’ preceding books, Princeton University is the hub for various tales, from personal accounts to a charter school’s increased budget adversely affecting public schools. But the town of Princeton is especially suitable to this novel; as a sanctuary city, it’s largely protected from Donald Trump’s recent immigrant deportation orders. In addition to racial and religious intolerance, Clovis perceptively tackles other subjects, like new journalism (Facebook as a subpar news source). She retains her effective time motif even in lighthearted moments: university students having to duck out of long lectures to feed parking meters. Most winsome, however, is the story of Clovis giving a heart-shaped pin to Carnethia (mother to Ida B., about whom the author’s previously written), a blue-collar university employee. The pin becomes a “souvenir of time travel,” somehow making its way back to the author. Readers of her earlier works will come to expect Clovis’ precise, striking descriptions: “The green-aged slate plates of roof hold folded, pale yellow, dim-lit, multi-paned windows that reflect the daylight.”
An insightful and earnest collection of stories centered on a sanctuary city.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5043-8492-6
Page Count: 112
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Neither romantic nor heroic, Shattuck’s new novel seems atypical of current World War II fiction but makes sincere,...
Three German “widow[s] of the resistance,” who spend time together at a run-down castle when World War II ends, embody aspects of the catastrophe that overcame their country.
Germany, 1945: in this devastated landscape where “no one was innocent,” there is misery for all and plenty to spare. Guilt, shame, suffering, and silence go hand in hand as the German people emerge from war and fascism, and Europe is awash with displaced persons. Shattuck’s (Perfect Life, 2009, etc.) third novel centers on the von Lingenfels castle, a place of aristocratic indulgence in prewar years, now a ruined shell owned by Marianne von Lingenfels, the widow of Albrecht, one of a group of men who failed in an attempt to assassinate Hitler and were hanged. It’s this group which links Marianne to the two other women and their children, whom she invites to the castle for shelter: Benita Fledermann, widow of the charismatic Constantine, who survived the Russian occupation of Berlin but paid a heavy price; and Ania Grabarek, who walked west, out of the wreckage of Poland, with her two sons and is also keeping secrets about what she has seen and done. In this primer about how evil invades then corrupts normal existence, Shattuck delivers simple, stark lessons on personal responsibility and morality. Inevitably, it makes for a dark tale, more a chronology of three overlapping, contaminated, emblematic lives than a plot. Some final uplift does arrive, however, via the views of the next generation, which apply a useful layer of distance and some hope on the sins of the fathers—and mothers.
Neither romantic nor heroic, Shattuck’s new novel seems atypical of current World War II fiction but makes sincere, evocative use of family history to explore complicity and the long arc of individual responses to a mass crime.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-256366-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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