Exalts logistics over logic.
The lives of a 1930s circus performer and a 1950s runaway daughter intersect at an upstate New York horse farm.
Wiseman’s (Coal River, 2015, etc.) fourth novel opens in 1931, as Lilly Blackwood gazes out at her family's horse farm from a window in the attic she is never allowed to leave. Her hyperreligious mother views Lilly as a monster and a punishment for some undefined sin. Her father visits her and has given her a pet cat, but he does nothing to liberate her. We learn the nature of Lilly’s deformity—albinism—when, on her 10th birthday, her mother, in her father’s absence, sells her to Barlow Brothers’ Circus. Lilly grows up among the sideshow freaks, exhibited first as the Ice Princess from Another Planetand later as The Albino Medium. Her enslavement is brutally enforced by Merrick, the embittered sideshow manager. Fortunately, Lilly’s unusual affinity for animals endears her to Cole, Barlow’s elephant trainer, and she advances to the circus proper as an elephant rider. She marries Cole and becomes pregnant. In the alternating '50s chapters, Julia, now 18, fled Blackwood Manor horse farm at 15 to escape her dysfunctional mother, clearly also Lilly’s mother. A hardscrabble three years among the working poor ends when her mother dies and Julia inherits Blackwood. (Her father, also clearly Lilly’s father, is already dead.) Julia’s story is primarily a quest to understand her parents’ failure to provide “unconditional love.” As Blackwood's new owner, Julia adopts horse-friendly policies, such as allowing foals to be nursed by their own mothers. In an apparent authorial ploy to build suspense, an inordinate number of pages are taken up with Julia’s meticulous search of Blackwood Manor’s many musty rooms and their mustier contents. But readers will have long figured out the answers to Julia’s main query: is that albino in circus garb, pictured in those old newspaper clippings, related to her, and if so, how? Too much effort is expended on set dressing in both narratives and not enough on crafting a convincing back story to explain the parents’ criminal behavior.
Exalts logistics over logic.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61773-449-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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