Though gripping, even moving at times, the novel doesn’t do justice to the solemn history from which it is drawn.
In this follow-up to the widely read The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018), a young concentration camp survivor is sentenced to 15 years’ hard labor in a Russian gulag.
The novel begins with the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops in 1945. In the camp, 16-year-old Cecilia "Cilka" Klein—one of the Jewish prisoners introduced in Tattooist—was forced to become the mistress of two Nazi commandants. The Russians accuse her of collaborating—they also think she might be a spy—and send her to the Vorkuta Gulag in Siberia. There, another nightmarish scenario unfolds: Cilka, now 18, and the other women in her hut are routinely raped at night by criminal-class prisoners with special “privileges”; by day, the near-starving women haul coal from the local mines in frigid weather. The narrative is intercut with Cilka’s grim memories of Auschwitz as well as her happier recollections of life with her parents and sister before the war. At Vorkuta, her lot improves when she starts work as a nurse trainee at the camp hospital under the supervision of a sympathetic woman doctor who tries to protect her. Cilka also begins to feel the stirrings of romantic love for Alexandr, a fellow prisoner. Though believing she is cursed, Cilka shows great courage and fortitude throughout: Indeed, her ability to endure trauma—as well her heroism in ministering to the sick and wounded—almost defies credulity. The novel is ostensibly based on a true story, but a central element in the book—Cilka’s sexual relationship with the SS officers—has been challenged by the Auschwitz Memorial Research Center and by the real Cilka’s stepson, who says it is false. As in Tattooist, the writing itself is workmanlike at best and often overwrought.
Though gripping, even moving at times, the novel doesn’t do justice to the solemn history from which it is drawn.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-26570-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Life in the immediate aftermath of slavery is powerfully rendered in this impressive first novel.
An engrossing debut novel explores the lives of emancipated slaves struggling to survive in the years just after the Civil War.
Atakora’s historical novel is set on a ruined plantation in the rural South so remote that its black inhabitants have rarely seen white people in the years since the war ended. In some ways, freedom hasn’t yet changed their lives; with few resources and little knowledge of the outside world, most of them have remained on the land they used to work for the late Marse Charles. The book’s protagonist is a young woman named Rue. She is the town’s midwife and healer, having learned her skills from her mother, Miss May Belle, who was beloved and trusted by her neighbors (and occasionally called upon to cast curses). After her mother’s death and amid the chaos that follows the war, Rue reluctantly takes May Belle’s place. Although Rue has lived among them all her life, the townspeople begin to turn against her after she delivers a baby for a woman named Sarah. Born with a caul, pale skin, and strange black eyes, the boy, called Bean, unnerves them. Then other children fall ill; despite Rue’s herbs and tinctures, some die, and whispers spread—is she a healer or a witch? The townspeople turn for comfort to a charismatic itinerant preacher called Bruh Abel, and Rue must decide whether he’s an adversary or an ally, all while keeping a dangerous secret. Based in part on narratives of formerly enslaved people gathered by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, the novel gives its characters complex lives, rendered in well-crafted prose. Although Atakora writes of such horrors as lynchings, beatings, and rapes, most of her story focuses on the intense relationships among people trying to make sense of a world turned upside down. Mother-child relationships, especially, are at the center of the book. Using frequent flashbacks to “slaverytime” and “wartime” and occasional jumps to the future, Atakora structures a plot with plenty of satisfying twists.
Life in the immediate aftermath of slavery is powerfully rendered in this impressive first novel.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-51148-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Closely observed and elegantly written: an overstuffed story that embraces decades and a large cast of characters without...
An assured debut novel that sets the life of one man against the tumultuous backdrop of Palestine in the waning years of British occupation.
Midhat Kamal has been thoroughly steeped in French culture—writes Hammad, he “knew the names of his internal organs as ‘le poumon’ and ‘le coeur’ and ‘le cerveau’ and ‘l’encéphale’ ”—but is never at home in his dreamed-of France, where he has come from his home in Nablus to study medicine. His French isn’t quite perfect, not at first, which occasions an odd thought: “What if, since by the same token one could not afford ambiguity, everything also became more direct?” Things happen directly enough that he’s soon enfolded in various dramas acted out by the good people of Montpellier. Midhat is a philosophically inclined soul who, as his yearned-for Jeannette remarks, is wont “to rely on what other people have said” in the countless books he’s read. Like Zhivago, he is aware of events but somehow apart from them. When he returns to Nablus at a time when European Jews are heeding Herzl’s call and moving to Palestine, he finds the city divided not just by the alignments of social class, but also by a new politics: “We must resist all of the Jews,” insists a neighbor of Midhat’s, advocating a militant solution that others think should be directed at the British colonizers. Hammad sometimes drifts into the didactic in outlining an exceedingly complex history, but she does so with a poet’s eye for detail, writing, for instance, of Nablus’ upper-class women, who “grow fat among cushions and divert their vigour into childbirth and playing music, and siphon what remained into promulgating rumors about their rivals." The years pass, and Midhat weathers change, illness, madness, and a declining command of French, seeking and finding love and family: At the end, he announces, “When I look at my life…I see a whole list of mistakes. Lovely, beautiful mistakes. I wouldn’t change them.”
Closely observed and elegantly written: an overstuffed story that embraces decades and a large cast of characters without longueurs.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2943-7
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
