Detailed, compelling and ambitious historical fiction about the long struggle for Philippine independence.
A historical novel that dramatizes the Philippine Revolution at the close of the 19th century.
In her fiction debut, Palileo uses the life of idealistic young seminarian Placido Mendoza to tell the tempestuous story of the Philippine Revolution. The revolt began in 1896 when a clandestine Filipino independence movement, the Katipunan, was discovered by the Philippines’ Spanish colonial overlords. Palileo uses Mendoza’s interactions with a dozen prominent figures to weave a fast-moving, complex and sprawling tale along the lines of James Clavell’s Shogun (1975) or Gary Jennings’ The Journeyer (1984). Most readers will be unfamiliar with the long-simmering tensions between the Spanish friars, who exercised ruthless power to maintain control of the colony, and the titular indios, the common people who increasingly agitated for their freedom. Mendoza is an ilustrado, a college-educated member of the native population, and in Palileo’s well-staged opening scene set in 1872, the complacency of Mendoza’s world is shattered: He watches, horrified, as one of his clerical mentors is publicly executed by order of the colonial administration. Nine-year-old Andres Bonifacio is also in the crowd; his future as a revolutionary leader is foreshadowed by his angry comment: “God is white...Jesus is white...All the saints are white...No Indio would get past San Pedro, priest or no priest.” Palileo ably intertwines Mendoza’s story with that of the growing revolutionary movement and does an excellent job of capturing the intellectual tensions that led from the first uprisings against the Spanish to the Battle of Manila Bay. She highlights not only Mendoza and his personal struggles, but also the larger-than-life Filipino Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo, who tends to steal every scene he’s in. Overall, the author skillfully develops the vectors of this tangled tale, illustrating how all sides attracted equally intelligent and passionate adherents. The story ends around 1898, leaving open the attractive prospect of a sequel.
Detailed, compelling and ambitious historical fiction about the long struggle for Philippine independence.Pub Date: June 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496021618
Page Count: 215
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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