Readers who are not devoted followers of Karon may be impatient with the glacial pace of this installment.
Book two of Karon’s new series about an Episcopal priest, The Father Tim Novels (Home to Holly Springs, 2007), continues as Father Tim’s long-awaited Ireland vacation turns into a busman’s holiday.
Father Tim Kavanagh, 70, and his wife, children’s author Cynthia, 64, have arrived at Broughadoon fishing lodge for a second honeymoon. A repeat visitor to the lodge, Tim re-encounters the proprietors, Anna Conor, her husband Liam and Anna’s daughter Bella, now a truculent teenager. Anna’s aging father William is the resident eminence grise. Until William bought it, Broughadoon was once part of the estate of Evelyn Conor, chatelaine of the adjacent manor house, Catharmore. The once lovely Evelyn, Liam’s formidable mother, is now an elderly alcoholic still furious with William for welshing on his youthful promise of marriage. (Instead, she married wealthy Riley Conor.) As if to prove there’s no vacation from Tim’s vocation, spiritually unsettling stuff happens. An intruder leaps out of a wardrobe, startling Cynthia, who stumbles, respraining her recently healed ankle. A priceless painting disappears from Broughadoon’s parlor. His Catholic hosts seek Tim out as an informal confessor. Anna is worried that William may actually be Liam’s father. Liam frets about the same possibility. William still regrets abandoning Evelyn. Meanwhile over at Catharmore, Evelyn has decided to detox and give her geriatric liver a fighting chance, only to suffer injuries in a fall. Tim accompanies Evelyn to the hospital (the Catholic priest being off on his own holiday) because her older son Paddy has retreated into his own boozy haze. Father Tim sees in Bella the same type of implacability that led him to take on his troubled adopted son Dooley. Can he foster similar paternal determination in Liam? Tim and Cynthia peruse a journal, circa 1861, written by Catharmore’s first owner. The long journal entries do little to advance the present story but are sometimes a welcome diversion from it.
Readers who are not devoted followers of Karon may be impatient with the glacial pace of this installment.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02212-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Riley’s obtuseness makes her a uniquely incompetent detective, an investigative reporter constantly surprised by...
Another hot tip from her best informant, her mother, leads TV reporter Riley Spartz (Killing Kate, 2011, etc.) far from the Twin Cities to a murder among the Amish community in misnamed Harmony, Minn.
There was little enough chance of identifying the dead woman who’d been stripped naked, wrapped in a homemade quilt, and dumped in a sinkhole weeks before Josh Kueppers, 10, falls into the hole with the corpse and blows off her face with his shotgun in a panic. Since there are no photos available of the victim and the whole drama is playing out far from Channel 3’s market audience, Riley’s lecherous new boss, news director Bryce Griffin, isn’t eager to turn her loose on the story. But once the dead woman is identified as Sarah Yoder, 18, Riley persuades Griffin to send her back to Harmony, only to get predictably stiffed by Sarah’s mother, Miriam, Bishop Abram Stoltzfus and the rest of the closemouthed Amish. Only Linda Kloeckner, the Lamplight Inn owner who put up Sarah when she ran away from home shortly after committing her life to the community, and Isaac Hochstetler, who briefly employed her at Everything Amish, are willing to talk to Riley, and their information doesn’t do much to sensitize the reporter who asks her confessor, Father Mountain, whether ritual shunning by the Amish community is “worse than unfriending someone on Facebook.” No wonder a pair of attackers break into Riley’s room at the Lamplight Inn and (gasp!) cut her hair.
Riley’s obtuseness makes her a uniquely incompetent detective, an investigative reporter constantly surprised by developments less likely to ambush seasoned genre fans.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6463-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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