Run-of-the-mill psychological thriller tarted up with psychobabble.
Is the governor of Louisiana planning to kill his daughter because he knows that she knows he killed her mother to further his political and romantic interests—or is the daughter simply paranoid?
Thirty-five-year-old Grayson Guillory finds an unmarked video in a hollowed-out copy of a Huey Long biography. Even before she watches it, she suspects the worst, and she’s right: the tape shows Grayson’s mother, shortly before her supposed suicide 11 months before, claiming that her husband, whose political ambitions range beyond the governor’s mansion, was plotting with others to kill her. Still deeply depressed about her mother’s death, Grayson begins to suspect every word and deed of her beloved father—who waited only two months to marry his dead wife’s sister. She also suspects his cronies, including her own fiancé Carter, her father’s closest political aide. Using italics to suggest the divisions growing inside Grayson as she second-guesses her own and everyone else’s motivations, Dewberry (a.k.a. Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn: Break the Heart of Me, 1994, etc.) effectively depicts her narrator’s increasing paranoia as it races alongside her increasingly reasonable dread. But Grayson is so spoiled and self-centered that readers will find it difficult to care much about her predicament, particularly since the narrow world she and the governor’s entourage inhabit is peopled by others even less likable or believable. Grayson’s mother is the worst sort of Tennessee Williams reject while her father is a Huey Long wannabe. Carter, meanwhile, is a noncharacter whose only interesting trait, collecting fish for his salt-water aquarium, turns out to be a plot device. Since his relationship with Grayson lacks nuance or romance, the fact that he may be manipulating or betraying her isn’t particularly disturbing. In truth, as the body count rises, the mystery of who did what becomes almost comically obvious—despite Dewberry’s ever-so-serious pretensions.
Run-of-the-mill psychological thriller tarted up with psychobabble.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14854-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: BlueHen/Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Two lessons: Don’t discount a woman just because she’s made of clay, and consider your wishes carefully should you find that...
Can’t we all just get along? Perhaps yes, if we’re supernatural beings from one side or another of the Jewish-Arab divide.
In her debut novel, Wecker begins with a juicy premise: At the dawn of the 20th century, the shtetls of Europe and half of “Greater Syria” are emptying out, their residents bound for New York or Chicago or Detroit. One aspirant, “a Prussian Jew from Konin, a bustling town to the south of Danzig,” is an unpleasant sort, a bit of a bully, arrogant, unattractive, but with enough loose gelt in his pocket to commission a rabbi-without-a-portfolio to build him an idol with feet of clay—and everything else of clay, too. The rabbi, Shaalman, warns that the ensuing golem—in Wecker’s tale, The Golem—is meant to be a slave and “not for the pleasures of a bed,” but he creates her anyway. She lands in Manhattan with less destructive force than Godzilla hit Tokyo, but even so, she cuts a strange figure. So does Ahmad, another slave bottled up—literally—and shipped across the water to a New York slum called Little Syria, where a lucky Lebanese tinsmith named Boutros Arbeely rubs a magic flask in just the right way and—shazam!—the jinni (genie) appears. Ahmad is generally ticked off by events, while The Golem is burdened with the “instinct to be of use.” Naturally, their paths cross, the most unnatural of the unnaturalized citizens of Lower Manhattan—and great adventures ensue, for Shaalman is in the wings, as is a shadowy character who means no good when he catches wind of the supernatural powers to be harnessed. Wecker takes the premise and runs with it, and though her story runs on too long for what is in essence a fairy tale, she writes skillfully, nicely evoking the layers of alienness that fall upon strangers in a strange land.
Two lessons: Don’t discount a woman just because she’s made of clay, and consider your wishes carefully should you find that magic lamp.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-211083-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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