A charming and well-crafted tale of family, compassion, and acceptance.
A pastor and a young mother connect over their love for a child with autism in this novel.
Hana is a parent trying to start a new life. But for the moment, she has ended up in the basement at her sister Kara’s house in a small town in Oklahoma. “Kara’s was a prettily packaged life, the kind with ribbons and a bow,” Kaufman (The Story People, 2016) writes of the two sisters. “Hana’s was a banged and dented UPS box left on the wrong doorstep.” Indeed, Kara has a seemingly perfect spouse and children while Hana has had to flee Cincinnati to escape her abusive ex-husband, Zeke, and struggles with her autistic son, Isaac. His behavior ranges from adorable (insisting on bringing his turtle, Rocky, everywhere) to disturbing (hitting himself or pulling out his own hair). After being humiliated during a service at Hope Church by one of Isaac’s tantrums, Hana thinks she’s at her breaking point. But suddenly, the small community lives up to its church’s name. Kara’s pastor, Matt Schofield, gladly lets Isaac examine his beard and tell him all about turtles. For Matt, Isaac is the chance to break out of his routine and make up for something terrible that happened to a similar little boy long ago, before autism was commonly understood. And for Hana, Matt might mean the chance for a normal life. Throughout this sweet story, Kaufman does an excellent job of portraying Hana’s frustrations and unrelenting love for Isaac. Her twinges of irritation when people try to explain away Isaac’s problem, even in helpful and loving ways, perfectly capture this mother’s efforts to treat her son like any other while also dealing with the realities of autism. These well-constructed tensions make it all the more satisfying when Matt finally arrives and connects with Isaac on his terms. The book stumbles a bit toward its conclusion, bringing Zeke back as an unnecessary—and far too creepy—last-minute villain, but readers should ultimately find the journey of Hana and her very special Isaac delightful.
A charming and well-crafted tale of family, compassion, and acceptance.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7586-5789-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Concordia Publishing House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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