Creaky joints, rough seams, thin characters, intrusively insistent evocations of the 1950s: a tale, nevertheless, that...
Feldman (Lucy, 2003, etc.), a.k.a. Elizabeth Villars, imagines there being another survivor from the secret annex besides Otto Frank.
Peter van Pels (van Daan in the Diary) is imagined here as having survived Mauthausen, been processed as a DP, and sent to New York for a new life of security and health as an American. And Peter does very well indeed. He forms a profitable company that puts up tract houses in New Jersey, just ahead of the huge postwar migration to the suburbs. He also marries (living in one of his own houses), has two daughters, then a son—and, by rights, ought to be happy. Yet at story’s opening, Peter is in a psychiatrist’s office, irascible, short-tempered—and without his voice. When did he lose it? On the night, we learn, when his wife was reading Anne’s Diary. Peter will become increasingly rigid, paranoid, even suicidal—all because, as the reader knows from the very moment Peter steps off the ship, his desire for survival and security (his and his family’s) demanded that he pass as a non-Jew (he’d be “on the safe side of the line”), his blue eyes and brown hair making this possible in spite of the camp tattoo on his arm. But the price he pays for attempting to turn his back on the past grows clear only in those years when Anne’s Diary sweeps the world as play and then movie—and Peter grows outraged at the untruthfulness of it: the suffering left out, made not real, and the way—for dramatic effect—that his own father is reduced to a man who sneaks bread from the others while all are starving. Peter’s transformation is mechanical and hasty, but, to all, he will admit his deceit, “[crying] for the second murder of my parents, the one I had committed by silence.”
Creaky joints, rough seams, thin characters, intrusively insistent evocations of the 1950s: a tale, nevertheless, that achieves drive, even some seriousness.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-939-05944-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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