This story within a story deals principally with the Turkish genocide of Armenians more than a century ago and the displacement that ensued.
Debut novelist Saroyan’s story begins in the present day in Istanbul with two former lovers, Armenian-American Mari Alexander and Turkish Selim Bayrak, who reconnect over a startling discovery: the diary of Ani Noroyan. It details her marriage to a master goldsmith and, as danger looms, her sending her 15-year-old son, Paul, on his own to Istanbul in 1895. There, he’s taken in by Taki Economides, a Greek executive chef in the German Embassy. Paul rises rapidly due to his obvious talent at preparing food. During this charmed period, he falls in love and marries the beautiful Vasso, an orphan whom the Economides have also taken in—but from the start, there’s something worrisome about the young woman. Eventually, anti-Armenian terror spreads from the eastern provinces to Istanbul, and Paul and his growing family must flee. A stopover in Marseille, France, is enticing, but America, the promised land, beckons. There, however, they experience one crushing hardship after another. Paul doesn’t speak English, and he’s forced to swallow his justifiable pride and start at the bottom of a new career, working at a textile job. Meanwhile, Vasso sulks; she refuses to learn English and won’t lift a finger to help the family—but she will seek out men to salve her vanity. Saroyan effectively draws on elements of her own Greek and Armenian family’s immigrant experiences while providing details of life in Istanbul—specifically, all the sights, sounds, aromas, rituals, the rambunctious family life in the Economides’ compound. She also depicts all the love that Paul has for Vasso—love that makes the days in America exquisitely painful as Paul begins to crumble under the strain. Along the way, she makes readers realize that although Vasso was troubled from an early age, it was really geopolitical forces beyond their control—that bitter gift of fate—that did her and Paul in.
A powerful novel that’s especially relevant in the current era of Middle Eastern displacement.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-979763-18-9
Page Count: 308
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION
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Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
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The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Black takes time out from chronicling the neighborhood-themed exploits of half-French detective Aimée Leduc to introduce a heroine as American as apple pie.
Kate Rees never expected to see Paris again, especially not under these circumstances. Born and bred in rural Oregon, she earned a scholarship to the Sorbonne, where she met Dafydd, a handsome Welshman who stole her heart. The start of World War II finds the couple stationed in the Orkney Islands, where Kate impresses Alfred Stepney of the War Department with the rifle skills she developed helping her dad and five brothers protect the family’s cattle. After unimaginable tragedy strikes, Stepney recruits Kate for a mission that will allow her to channel her newly ignited rage against the Germans who’ve just invaded France. She’s parachuted into the countryside, where her fluent French should help her blend in. Landing in a field, she hops a milk train to Paris, where she plans to shoot Adolf Hitler as he stands on the steps of Sacre-Coeur. Instead, she kills his admiral and has to flee through the streets of Paris, struggling to hook up with the rescuers who are supposed to extract her. Meanwhile, Gunter Hoffman, a career policeman in a wartime assignment with the Reichssicherheitsdienst security forces, is charged with finding the assassin who dared attempt to kill the Führer. It’s hard to see how it can end well for both the cop and the cowgirl. The heroine’s flight is too episodic to capitalize on Black’s skill at character development, but she’s great at raising readers’ blood pressure.
A killer thriller.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
Categories: CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER | THRILLER | HISTORICAL THRILLER | HISTORICAL FICTION | SUSPENSE
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BOOK REVIEW
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The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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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 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Categories: RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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