A stirring story of Berlin teens’ contributions to the Resistance, but a slightly blinkered view of the Holocaust limits the...
A historical novel focuses on Christian opposition to the Nazis in Germany during World War II.
As the book opens in June 1943, two 17-year-olds set out for Berlin. One is Marek Menkowicz; his parents (a Jewish mother and Roman Catholic father) are missing, so he’s departing Warsaw to stay with an uncle in the German capital. Marek learned to bake and operate a printing press at the monastery led by Father Maximilian Kolbe, later killed at Auschwitz. Meanwhile, history buff Liddy Mittendorf leaves her grandmother’s Munich home to return to the family bakery in Berlin. Her father, Klaus, works nights as a prison guard and delivers secret letters for Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, arrested for plotting to kill Hitler. Impressed by Marek’s marble rye loaf, the Mittendorfs hire him to work mornings at the bakery; in his remaining time, he supports the Resistance by printing fake identification papers. The Mittendorfs don’t know he’s part-Jewish, and Liddy only later learns of his Resistance involvement. With Conrad Keppler of the Nazi police a frequent bakery visitor, the teens must be vigilant. Cornelius (Good News—I Failed, a Story of Inventing in Minnesota, 2011) weaves in the cameos from historical figures nicely and avoids stereotyping Nazis as heartless villains. For instance, Keppler, a former music professor, teaches 8-year-old Willy Mittendorf to play the piano, and the simple message of God’s unconditional love helps the Nazi overcome his bitterness about his brother’s death. Marek and Liddy are gutsy, relatable characters in a budding romance; their adventures should be inspirational for readers of Christian YA fiction. And Bonhoeffer’s words are as poignant as ever: “judging others makes us blind,” and “silence in the face of evil is evil itself.” But the redemption of an apparently evil character like Keppler, though touching, forms a bitter contrast with what happens to Marek and makes the sudden conclusion feel falsely positive. Everything’s coming up roses for the Mittendorfs, it seems, while the Jewish genocide only really appears via a concentration camp scene in a dream.
A stirring story of Berlin teens’ contributions to the Resistance, but a slightly blinkered view of the Holocaust limits the tale’s authenticity.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-946016-10-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: Lighthouse Publishing of the Carolinas
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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