In a satisfying sequel to Father Melancholy’s Daughter (1990), Godwin contemplates family ties, the prickly bonds of marriage, and the varieties of religious faith. Walter and Ruth Gower’s daughter is now Margaret Bonner, 33, an Episcopal minister like her father, married to his former helpmeet Adrian Bonner. A friend accused Margaret of reproducing her dead parents— mistakes, and that’s partly true: like Ruth, she has married a much older man subject to bad bouts of depression, in Adrian’s case taking the form of maddening assertions of unworthiness. Margaret hasn—t yet bolted as her mother did, but the Bonner marriage is not in good shape as Margaret’s first-person account begins at the end of November 1999. —The eve of the Third Millennium— exacerbates tensions in High Balsam, a North Carolina town nestled in the Smoky Mountains where year-rounders— resentment of the wealthy summer people has recently sparked some ugly incidents. Freelance fundamentalist Grace Munger proposes to heal these tensions with a Millennium Birthday March for Jesus, aggressively pursuing the reluctant Margaret’s support. Other new arrivals contributing to the story’s complications are Tony, a lay Episcopalian brother who has closer links to the Bonners than he initially reveals; and Chase Zorn, a troubled teenager at the school where Adrian serves as chaplain. As usual with Godwin, all the characters are superbly drawn, particularly the irritating but lovable Adrian and ruthlessly manipulative Grace, who nonetheless arouses feelings of emotional kinship in Margaret. The young minister herself is a thoroughly engaging heroine whose struggles with spiritual and domestic commitment are convincingly and unpretentiously depicted. In Godwin’s leisurely, nouveau-Victorian narrative, people are sometimes improbably quick to lay out their life-stories for strangers and astoundingly well-informed about their motives, but that suits the book’s reflective tone, as does the epilogue, which wraps up loose ends 20 years later. A solid piece of work from one of our most thoughtful popular novelists.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-345-37244-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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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