Passion-plagued characters, an adverb for every emotion, and an addictive novel-within-a-novel come together for something...
A “long and complicated childhood” becomes a complicated adulthood for two families in Palmer’s entertaining sixth (The Golden Rule, 1998, etc.).
The paths of the Harding family and the Fox family cross in 1928, when Sybil Fox, widow, comes on as governess at the Harding country house in England. Though as different as “chalk and cheese,” Nettie Harding (the one daughter among three brothers) and Mary Fox (Sybil’s daughter) become best friends. As the dictates of class and melodrama would have it, Mary Fox falls in love with the eldest Harding brother, Godfrey (who has a dark secret), but she in turn is loved by his brother William. Nettie seduces the stable boy, Joshua, and, after they are caught in flagrante it seems pretty certain that Joshua will reappear at a most inconvenient time in Nettie’s future. Among the grown-ups, Sybil Fox seduces father Geoffry Harding, a political bigwig who spends most of his time in London with the mysterious Rafe Bartholomew (Churchill's closest confidante) rather than at home with wife Davina. Then, just as the misguided desires of the various Hardings and Foxes threaten to erupt, all becomes subsumed into a greater issue: WWII. The Harding boys go off to battle; Nettie marries a wealthy alcoholic, changes her name to Venetia, and offers sexual favors in return for political secrets; Sybil Fox leaves behind her “notebooks” and her bereaved daughter, Mary, who takes a job helping to crack the German code. The search for true love, the misalignment of loyalties, and ever-ready Chaos are the true engines of Palmer’s story, throughout whose second half many bombs are dropped—by war, by friends, by family—that shatter illusions and unearth astonishing numbers of secrets in the lives of all.
Passion-plagued characters, an adverb for every emotion, and an addictive novel-within-a-novel come together for something akin to a satisfying mug of ale.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26141-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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
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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