And never mind the loose ends: there’s another volume on the way, and we look forward to it.
What lies on the other side of the beyond? Does The Shadow know? Certainly the Invisible Man does, and therein lies a knot in Palma’s (The Map of the Sky, 2012, etc.) newest delightful puzzler.
Said unseeable person comes into the picture courtesy of H.G. Wells, with whom Palma’s tale opens. Wells is an unflappable model of Victorian Englishness, convinced that “his was the most significant generation to have walked the Earth” inasmuch as—among other things—it possessed the seeds of the knowledge required to end life on the planet. Rational and resolute, Wells must grapple with the unfolding reality that there’s a whole irrational, surreal, irresolute world out there, some of it of his own creation. Palma is happy, it seems, with the idea that writers are pretty significant people at that: in the panoply of heroes he enlists to the cause of humankind’s salvation are Arthur Conan Doyle and Lewis Carroll. Then there’s fearless vampire/werewolf/villain hunter Cornelius Clayton, never too busy to appreciate “proud breasts” and baronial manses and for whom things can never get quite weird enough, and his own army of allies, confidants, and informants, including a friendly proto-shrink who helpfully says, “If I devoted myself to treating stupid people I would have a full practice, and I would be a wealthy man.” Palma’s principal players are anything but stupid, but they do have a way of finding themselves in supernatural jams. His shaggy doggish, steampunk-y tale, with many moving parts, threatens to spin off disconnectedly at any moment, but somehow he keeps things straight (and straight-faced, though he is often very dryly funny); in the end it all coheres, however improbable the story he conjures. Though sometimes talky and sometimes didactic (“But more importantly, he was afraid that if he continued writing Sherlock Holmes adventures, his readers would identify him with what he considered not his best writing”), Palma’s yarn is altogether a satisfying, thoroughly entertaining creature feature.
And never mind the loose ends: there’s another volume on the way, and we look forward to it.Pub Date: June 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8818-4
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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