An impressive if occasionally labored debut.
A play by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore serves as a source of hope for Jewish orphans in wartime Warsaw and, decades later, for Communist revolutionaries in the Indian state of West Bengal.
Jaryk Smith is just 9 in 1942 and living in the (real-life) Warsaw ghetto orphanage run by doctor and author Janusz Korczak when he plays the role of Amal—a sickly Indian child who dreams of worlds beyond his home—in the Tagore play Dak Ghar. Days later, the Nazis send all the area's Jews to the Treblinka death camp; Jaryk is the only one of Korczak's 200 charges to escape the gas chambers. In the displaced persons camp where he winds up after the war, he's reunited with Misha Waszynski, who had worked at the orphanage. Nearly three decades on, having immigrated to New York, Jaryk and Misha have become lifelong friends with a shared history. Despite being wracked by survivor’s guilt, Jaryk is beginning to explore a relationship with Lucy Gardner, a woman who works in the city’s employment agency. Their relationship is disrupted when Jaryk learns of Misha’s death thousands of miles away, in the Indian state of West Bengal, where he had traveled to help produce the very same Tagore play. Unsettled by his friend’s demise, Jaryk travels to India to retrieve Misha’s ashes and inadvertently gets embroiled in the Naxalite uprising, the Communist movement that sparked in 1970s India. Chakrabarti deftly explores the weight of history, a touching love story, and Jaryk’s heart-wrenching survivor’s guilt. Woven throughout is the play that teaches you not about life, but about dying. It prepared the orphans for the unimaginable, as Jaryk remembers. The narrative struggles under the weight of its responsibility to these compelling themes and shortchanges a few, such as the Communist uprising, while Jaryk’s internal struggles and love for Lucy stretch on for too long.
An impressive if occasionally labored debut.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-65892-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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