A vividly evoked, keenly detailed coming-of-age story.
World War II comes too close to home for a boy growing up in a Welsh coal-mining village.
Eleven-year-old Anthony Jones, youngest son of a family of miners, spends his hardscrabble but exuberant days playing games with his gang of friends in a den they’ve crafted on local mountain Pen Pych, fending off the school bully, and listening to dramas on a secondhand radio. The possibility of a scholarship that would send Anthony to a grammar school (and thus keep him out of the mines) and rumors of the arrival of American forces threaten this routine. Then a German plane crashes into Pen Pych, and, the next day, the boys find in their den a wounded Polish prisoner of war, Piotr Skarbowitz, who parachuted from the plane before it crashed. Piotr is taken in by the Jones family and develops a special relationship with both Anthony and Anthony’s sister, Bethan, who works at the RAF field in nearby St. Athan, but he's virtually adopted by the entire village: the schoolteacher wants him to speak to her class, the baker provides free treats. When the American troops finally arrive, “It’s like the world has come to pay us a visit.” Author Kennedy (The Killing Handbook, 2012) ably handles a large cast of villagers and the point of view of a young boy without falling into sentimentality. The novel is at its best when it brings to vivid life the speech and routines of these hardworking people, their tragedies, stoicism, and modest romances, a way of life threatened by outsiders. A dance held at the GI base brings this tension to a head when the local girls refuse to dance with their neighbors, wanting to “save themselves so they could be asked by an American.” A plot twist involving Piotr provides a burst of drama and action but feels slightly out of place in this gentle world.
A vividly evoked, keenly detailed coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-09096-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
An elegant, pithy performance by a first-time novelist who couldn’t seem more familiar with his characters or territory.
Manhattan in the late 1930s is the setting for this saga of a bright, attractive and ambitious young woman whose relationships with her insecure roommate and the privileged Adonis they meet in a jazz club are never the same after an auto accident.
Towles' buzzed-about first novel is an affectionate return to the post–Jazz Age years, and the literary style that grew out of it (though seasoned with expletives). Brooklyn girl Katey Kontent and her boardinghouse mate, Midwestern beauty Eve Ross, are expert flirts who become an instant, inseparable threesome with mysterious young banker Tinker Grey. With him, they hit all the hot nightspots and consume much alcohol. After a milk truck mauls his roadster with the women in it, permanently scarring Eve, the guilt-ridden Tinker devotes himself to her, though he and she both know he has stronger feelings for Katey. Strong-willed Katey works her way up the career ladder, from secretarial job on Wall Street to publisher’s assistant at Condé Nast, forging friendships with society types and not allowing social niceties to stand in her way. Eve and Tinker grow apart, and then Kate, belatedly seeing Tinker for what he is, sadly gives up on him. Named after George Washington's book of moral and social codes, this novel documents with breezy intelligence and impeccable reserve the machinations of wealth and power at an historical moment that in some ways seems not so different from the current one. Tinker, echoing Gatsby, is permanently adrift. The novel is a bit light on plot, relying perhaps too much on description. But the characters are beautifully drawn, the dialogue is sharp and Towles avoids the period nostalgia and sentimentality to which a lesser writer might succumb.
An elegant, pithy performance by a first-time novelist who couldn’t seem more familiar with his characters or territory.Pub Date: July 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02269-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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