Weldon (Long Live the King, 2013, etc.) completes her Edwardian trilogy, a lightweight amalgam of Downton Abbey and her own Upstairs Downstairs, as Lord and Lady Dilberne prepare for a visit from King Edward VII.
Three years have passed since the last installment. Edward, now king, has invited himself and his entourage, including his mistress, to the Dilberne estate for a hunting weekend, much to Lady Isobel Dilberne’s chagrin. Since Lord Robert is actively involved in the government now, not to mention with his new mistress, she is the one who is burdened with installing new plumbing and heating and completely redecorating their large but antiquated home. At the moment, son Arthur, the car enthusiast, is living at the estate with his wife, Minnie, and their two young sons. Arthur married Chicago-born Minnie for love, not the money she stands to inherit from her rich but crude Irish-American parents, and despite knowing she was an “experienced” bride. But, devoted to his auto manufacturing company that has yet to produce a commercially viable vehicle, Arthur now takes Minnie for granted. Lonely, homesick for the United States and oppressed by Lady Isobel’s interference in her children’s upbringing, Minnie assumes the worst when she walks in on Arthur with a female journalist in an apparent state of undress. Minnie decamps to stay with Arthur’s sister Rosina. Recently returned from Australia a wealthy widow, with her finished manuscript on the sexual habits of the Aborigines ready to publish, Rosina has joined the literary and sexually liberated set on Fleet Street, Weldon’s satiric swipe at the Bloomsbury crowd. Will Minnie succumb to the temptations of Fleet Street or reunite with Arthur? Will Rosina find passion with her editor’s sister? Will Lady Isobel become romantically involved with the handsome, much younger police inspector assigned to arrange security in preparation for the royal visit? Will that visit end in triumph or disaster or both?
Funnier and nastier than the two earlier volumes but still lukewarm and without much fizz.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-02802-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION
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The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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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 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Categories: RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
An 18-year-old Polish girl falls in love, swoons over a first kiss, dreams of marriage—and, oh yes, we are in the middle of the Holocaust.
Jenoff (The Ambassador’s Daughter, 2013, etc.) weaves a tale of fevered teenage love in a time of horrors in the early 1940s, as the Nazis invade Poland and herd Jews into ghettos and concentration camps. A prologue set in 2013, narrated by a resident of the Westchester Senior Center, provides an intriguing setup. A woman and a policeman visit the resident and ask if she came from a small Polish village. Their purpose is unclear until they mention bones recently found there: “And we think you might know something about them.” The book proceeds in the third person, told from the points of view mostly of teenage Helena, who comes upon an injured young Jewish-American soldier, and sometimes of her twin, Ruth, who is not as adventurous as Helena but is very competitive with her. Their father is dead, their mother is dying in a hospital, and they are raising their three younger siblings amid danger and hardship. The romance between Helena and Sam, the soldier, is often conveyed in overheated language that doesn’t sit well with the era’s tragic events: “There had been an intensity to his embrace that said he was barely able to contain himself, that he also wanted more.” Jenoff, clearly on the side of tolerance, slips in a simplified historical framework for the uninformed. But she also feeds stereotypes, having Helena note that Sam has “a slight arch to his nose” and a dark complexion that “would make him suspect as a Jew immediately.” Clichés also pop up during the increasingly complex plot: “But even if they stood in place, the world around them would not.”
Romance and melodrama mix uneasily with mass murder.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1596-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Categories: GENERAL ROMANCE | LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | ROMANCE | HISTORICAL ROMANCE
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