A unique, musical novel that highlights the cultural riches people can offer one another in difficult circumstances.
The last survivor of a small Jewish sect comes to America after World War II to live in a Black community in Mississippi in Langer’s novel.
Long ago, Reb Shmuel Meir Lichtbencher (also called Sam Lightup) was born in Dekrepitz, a small Polish shtetl. Shmuel, the grandson of the Rebbe (Rabbi), knows little of the outside world. At the outset of World War II, a Russian officer witnesses Shmuel’s fiddle playing and sends him to a conservatory in Moscow. Shmuel survives the war, but everyone who remained in Dekreptiz, including his young wife and baby, is gone. Somehow, he ends up in Naples, and some Black American soldiers he’d been playing music with smuggle him aboard their ship. In America, at the home of his new friend, everyone wonders what this strange man, who doesn’t speak English, is doing in Leesboro, Mississippi. Shmuel knows how to raise and slaughter chickens, so they set him up with a place in the woods to do just that. A local woman, Lula Curtin, comes by to help him learn English and becomes interested in his religion. Shmuel, now known as Sam Lightup, begins talking like a Mississippi bluesman (“Ain’t no Dekrepitzers since the war”). Sam and Lula eventually marry, but, as an interracial couple, they face danger in Mississippi. Langer’s musical protagonist travels between worlds in a tremendously authentic way—the cross-cultural story is as at home in Europe as it is in the Mississippi Delta. The connections made, whether personal or musical (such as the relationship of Jewish vocal music to American blues), illustrate the commonalities between survivors in hostile environments. Perhaps the affinity portrayed between dispossessed Jews and American Blacks is a bit optimistic here, but the rural southern setting makes the story work.
A unique, musical novel that highlights the cultural riches people can offer one another in difficult circumstances.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9798991109703
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Cresheim Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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