A fresh take on forbidden love and forgiveness with warm, winning characters.
Gormly’s enjoyable debut novel explores the political, religious and social dynamics of rural life in fictional Tysen, Mo., during the summer of 1950.
Naomi Hollister’s husband, Russell, disappeared 12 years ago, leaving her a $1,000 check, his orphaned, 5-year-old nephew, Johnny, and the large house he grew up in. To survive and provide for Johnny, Naomi opened a small hotel, which gave her the ability to send Johnny to Missouri University in the fall. It also introduced her to Matt Neyerson, a sturdy and dependable boarder who knows “when to put down the newspaper.” Busby Howard, the local reverend, spews “hellfire and sparks” from the pulpit of the Baptist church, denouncing Johnny and Naomi for their association with Ray Redeem, a misunderstood troublemaker with plans to marry Alice Tolney, despite the previous arrangements Alice’s father made with wealthy Sample Forney. Howard’s proclamations spark a divide within the church and, ultimately, the entire town. Re-enter Russell, once “all splash and dance,” now sick with cancer and guilt, ready to share the truth about his desertion. Gormly’s multilayered narrative avoids melodrama and flows with ease, using the sights and sounds of an unfolding summer to allow the action to bloom. Precise period details and colloquialisms evoke an era of multiparty telephone lines, railroad travel and pie auctions. The omniscient narrator effectively portrays the interactions of Tysen’s citizens, such as Doobie Prat, who’d “never been a mean drunk, just a persistent one,” “railroad mistress” Bertie Reardon and Matilda and Albert St. John, the town eccentrics, who show up for Saturday night movies in the school gym wearing formal attire. With an easy touch, Gormly sheds light on their divided souls—whether they be “sprinklers” or “fish eaters,” in preacher Busby’s parlance for Methodists and Roman Catholics—and shows how redemption and acceptance can triumph over righteousness and ignorance.
A fresh take on forbidden love and forgiveness with warm, winning characters.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475933628
Page Count: 306
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A captivating Jewish twist on the classic American campus novel.
In Hopen’s ambitious debut, an Orthodox Jewish high school student finds his world transformed when his family moves to South Florida.
When protagonist Ari Eden leaves his bland life in Brooklyn—where he never felt deeply rooted—for a glitzy, competitive Modern Orthodox day school in the Miami suburbs, both readers and Ari himself are primed to expect a fish-out-of-water narrative. And indeed, Ari finds that his new classmates, though also traditionally observant by many standards, enjoy a lifestyle that is far more permissive than his own (a shade of Orthodoxy that is known as “yeshiva”). Suddenly Ari’s modest, pious world is replaced with a Technicolor whirlwind that includes rowdy parties, casual sex, drinking, drugs, and far more liberal interpretations of Jewish law than he has ever known. With its representation of multiple kinds of traditional Judaism, Hopen’s novel is a refreshing corrective to the popular tendency to erase the nuanced variations that exist under the umbrella of “Orthodoxy.” It also stands out for its stereotype-defying portrayal of Ari and his friends as teenagers with typical teenage concerns. But this is not just a novel about reorienting oneself socially or even religiously; though Ari’s level of observance certainly shifts, this is also not a simple “off the derech” (Jewish secularization) narrative. Ari’s new friend group, particularly its charismatic, enigmatic leader, Evan—a sort of foil for Ari—pushes him to consider new philosophical and existential norms as well as social, academic, and religious ones. The result is an entirely surprising tale, rich with literary allusions and Talmudic connections, about the powerful allure of belonging. This novel will likely elicit comparisons to the work of Chaim Potok: Like Potok’s protagonists, Ari is a religious Jew with a deep passion for literature, Jewish texts, and intellectual inquiry, and as in Potok’s fiction, his horizons are broadened when he encounters other forms of Orthodoxy. But Hopen’s debut may actually have more in common with campus novels like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Tobias Wolff’s Old School; its narrator’s involvement in an intense intellectual community leads him down an unexpected path that profoundly alters his worldview. The novel suffers due to its lamentably one-dimensional, archetypal female characters: the tortured-artist love interest, the ditsy blond, the girl next door. Hopen’s prose, and the scale of his project, occasionally feels overindulgent, but in that sense, form and content converge: This stylistic expansiveness is actually perfectly in tune with the world of the novel. Overall, Hopen’s debut signals a promising new literary talent; in vivid prose, the novel thoughtfully explores cultural particularity while telling a story with universal resonances.
A captivating Jewish twist on the classic American campus novel.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-297474-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
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
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