A poignant and poetic depiction of a tumultuous childhood.
In Sniechowski's (Living Your Love Every Day, 2016, etc.) autobiographical debut novel, a young boy struggles with the dogmatic and austere religion of his Old World Polish family.
Jim is only 9 years old in 1950, and so the chaotic, alcohol-drenched weekly family gatherings at his home can be overwhelming affairs. His maternal grandparents, Anna and Antoni, immigrated to Detroit from rural Poland, by way of Ellis Island, and brought their farming-peasant ways and rigid devotion to Catholicism with them. The weekly parties are typically tempestuous and artfully rendered: rowdy, brimming with intramural rivalry and repressed emotion. They’re also full of the family’s Polish character: they live in a Polish neighborhood, worship in a Polish parish, and often speak what author James calls “Engpolsh”—a messy hybrid of English and Polish. Jim longs to win the elusive approval of his father, an emotionally distant but volatile man nicknamed “Ketchup” for the way that his face and neck redden when he’s enraged. The games they play—poker and pinochle—are only superficially playful, as they’re also the means by which the competitive family members assert their dominance. Violence also haunts these meetings; at one point, Jim’s father intervenes when a neighbor, Aleksandr, savagely strikes his own daughter. Apparently, her offense was wearing pants; throughout the book, the author powerfully depicts the group’s deeply ingrained sexism, as even the women tacitly accept the idea that men are superior. He also effectively shows how his family’s religious devotion is mixed with less spiritual elements, including pride, and how that leaves plenty of room for the vitriolic expression of racial bigotry. This is the first installment in the author’s Leaving Home Trilogy, and it’s a beautifully impressionistic novel that he describes as “autobiographical fiction.” The prose is powerfully evocative, ably capturing the bewildered isolation Jim experiences in his own home: “At nine years old, I could feel that barrenness, the draining effect of mechanical living; feel but not make sense of; feel in my body like a worm screwing itself into my every day.”
A poignant and poetic depiction of a tumultuous childhood.Pub Date: March 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9707992-2-7
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Magic of Differences
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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