A thrilling and historically astute drama.
A debut autobiographical novel chronicles a woman’s perilous escape from Communist Russia with her son.
Victoria “Vica” Guidar was born in Leningrad and was blessed with a happy home life and a comfortable existence. While life behind the Iron Curtain was economically punishing for some, Vica’s family largely eluded the worst of the hardships. After studying graphic design for five years at an art academy in the Estonian Republic, she returns to Leningrad and falls in love with Gennady “Genka” Rosenberg, a dashingly handsome man who works in the film industry. After a torrid romance, they marry, and Vica has a son, Arthur. But Genka is a disinterested father and husband as well as an incompetent provider, buried under debt. Vica divorces him and eventually meets Dima, an engineer, and while there is no romantic electricity between them, he opens her eyes to the possibility of immigrating to another country and starting a new life. She worries that there is no future for her and her son in Russia and becomes disenchanted by the failure of Communism to deliver on its lofty promises. In addition, she is repulsed by the brutal discrimination of Jews. Vica hatches a complex plan to escape to Israel that involves remarrying Genka—as a Jew, he is given more freedom to leave the country than most. The risks, though, are great, especially since her family angrily opposes her designs—her brother even confiscates her passport to thwart them. Evangelista explains in a prefatory note that this is not a memoir, though it is inspired by her own life. The stirring plot is immersive, and the author vividly depicts the climate of fear and Orwellian propaganda perpetrated by a regime anxious to maintain its grip on the levers of power. The author delivers incisive historical details throughout the work. But the prose is wooden and even cliché-ridden—Vica describes herself as “a bird that was born to fly and doesn’t have the air to breathe and space to spread my wings.” Furthermore, the book includes old photographs of the author and her family, which confusedly blur the already fuzzy line between factual remembrance and creative invention.
A thrilling and historically astute drama.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9981731-1-5
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Empire Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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