Still, Shrake moves the plot along with zest. His portrait of a tiny nation, born in struggle, fighting to survive and to...
A vigorous portrait of the fledgling Texas republic, set in 1839 and involving a large cast of gaudy, outsize characters.
Journalist and screenwriter/novelist Shrake (Blessed McGill, 1967; coauthor, with Harvey Penick, And If You Play Golf, You're My Friend, 1993) has done his research well. Like Larry McMurtry, he has employed astonishing details about the period, and his backdrops—of Comanche and Cherokee villages, and small, embattled Texas towns—are convincing, as are the motivations of his characters, many based on actual figures. Their actions, however, can sometimes approach melodrama. Sister and brother Cullasaja amd Romulus Swift, the offspring of a Cherokee woman and an Irish-American sea captain and merchant, head west because beautiful, determined Cullajasa wants to find an Indian utopia rumored to be in Texas, a village built by her mother's people. The handsome, accomplished Romulus, a physician, accompanies her. They quickly fall afoul of the sexual psychopath Henry Longfellow, a Texas politician who, when his rape of Cullasaja is frustrated, plans revenge. All three become entangled with Matthew Caldwell, a bright, lethal frontiersman who is a captain in the newly formed Texas Rangers, trying to preserve Texas from another Mexican invasion and the plots of a variety of shabby politicians attempting to loot or exploit the new nation. Looming in the background are the Comanches, who claim much of Texas as their hunting ground and view the white settlers with bafflement and disdain. Before the narrative is over, the village Cullajasa has been seeking is destroyed, a disastrous war with the Comanches is instigated, and Longfellow exacts his vengeance. Shrake's battle scenes have a gory reality, and his depiction of life on the frontier is vivid and compelling. But the novel is slowed somewhat by characters who can seem one-dimensional. And a subtext regarding a mystical quest is both jarring and cryptic.
Still, Shrake moves the plot along with zest. His portrait of a tiny nation, born in struggle, fighting to survive and to invent an identity, is often gripping. An unusual, ambitious work of historical fiction.Pub Date: April 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-7868-6579-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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
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