by Frank E. Webb, III ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 16, 2016
A gleeful and action-packed, if utterly unbelievable, ride.
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In this debut thriller, a war between the United States and North Korea approaches, and only a teenager with peculiar powers can stop it.
Jessica DeLucca, a half-Italian, half-Navajo 19-year-old, grew up on the reservation where she lives. One day, during a fair there, a mysterious older woman seeks her out and gives her a necklace with a silver pendant. It turns out that this innocuous-looking piece of jewelry possesses extraordinary powers that only Jessica can access; for example, it can slice through any substance, even military-grade metal. Meanwhile, the United States government becomes embroiled in a parlous standoff with North Korea, which has somehow acquired a special long-range, anti-ship missile from China, with which it threatens to annihilate the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford. Jessica’s father, Jacob, works in a highly classified capacity for the government, and he’s part of a team trying to figure out how to respond to the new danger. Jessica reveals the awesome power of her necklace to him, and he realizes that it could be precisely the advantage the United States needs. He signs Jessica up as a government intern, and the two work as a team to avoid the recommencement of the Korean War. Webb’s novel combines sci-fi, magical fantasy, and political intrigue, making it resistant to easy classification. The pace of the plot is breakneck, and the action unfolds cinematically; indeed, there’s hardly a page without some drama or surprise. However, even for a story that’s explicitly designed to be fantastical, it not only stretches the limits of readers’ credulity, but seemingly dismisses them, layering one implausibility upon another. However, to the author’s credit, it does so very entertainingly. For example, Jessica not only speaks several dialects in different languages—she also plays drums in a Christian rock band, rides a motorcycle with the proficiency and confidence of a professional, and is an expert in eskrima, a Filipino martial art in which she uses a pair of hardwood “fighting sticks” that allow her to neutralize considerably bigger opponents.
A gleeful and action-packed, if utterly unbelievable, ride.Pub Date: May 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5127-3093-7
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
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 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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by Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017
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
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