by gerald yukevich Ivan Cox ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 19, 2022
A moving tale of an immigrant child’s trials.
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In this historical novel, a young Polish immigrant in Pennsylvania struggles under the mercurial despotism of his father.
In 1911, Tadeusz Malinowski—everyone calls him Taddy or Tad—moves with his family from Poland to the United States when he is only 8 weeks old. They settle in western Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, led inconstantly by Tad’s father, Ignaz, or Jumbo as he is often called, who dishonestly insists that he has a royal bloodline. Of all the siblings, Tad is the favorite of his mother, Eva—he is a sweet boy who diligently looks after his older brother, Ziggy, who is mentally disabled, dismissively counted to be among the “low IQ unfortunates.” The entire family suffers under Jumbo’s delusions of grandeur and infantile spirit—he is talented and enterprising but also viciously violent and selfish. When he falls into financial arrears, he takes to alcohol—for a time, he’s a bootlegger who largely supplies himself with booze—and routinely beats Eva, who fecklessly tries to hide her bruises from the children. When Eva dies—Tad, the narrator of the story, is only 10 at the time—Jumbo only worsens his tyrannical grip over the family, sexually abusing his own daughter, Vera. Tad is haunted by guilt over his mother’s death—he furtively helped her perform an abortion on herself, a gruesome procedure that ended her life, chillingly described by Cox. Eva tells Tad she needs help discarding some blood pudding: “What I dumped into the hole was not blood pudding. It was bloody, all right, but it looked like a little lifeless red and purple tadpole. At one end, it had some little purple fins coming out from it. It had a long vein wrapped around it that ended in a soft, lumpy pool of black clots.” In heartbreakingly poignant terms, Tad relates his struggle to love his father, a complicated man who by turns invites admiration and contempt: “My love for Jumbo is a bitter task of loyalty.”
The author’s plot can take on a desultory, meandering quality—it often reads like a series of impressionist recollections rather than a tightly structured story. But a sense of thematic unity begins to slowly emerge, accompanied by a thoughtful reflection on the very nature of remembrance. Tad muses about his mother: “My dreams are different from my memories, which are gleaned through this unquenchable urge to dig into the past. This compulsion began abruptly with her death and continued relentlessly for many years. Regrettably, this process exposed me again and again to the pain, but it always seemed worth it. I could not stop it.” The novel often intentionally feels like a memoir—Cox’s literacy conceit is that the book is found years later by Tad’s son, not to be read until a century after Eva’s death. The author’s storytelling can be punishingly gritty—one particular scene in which Tad is brutally raped by an adult is as difficult to read as it is to forget. Fortunately, there is more to this tale than despair and woes—there is plenty of humor as well as hope to lighten readers’ loads.
A moving tale of an immigrant child’s trials.Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63985-561-2
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Fulton Books
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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New York Times Bestseller
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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