A bright and engaging portrait of private lives rendered against a broad and vivid canvas of human history.
Finely nuanced historical, the first in a trilogy, from Britisher Stevenson (London Bridges, 2001, etc.): a fanciful yet credible and touching tale about the Queen of Bohemia and an African prince.
Holland in the 17th century is one of the busiest hives in Europe, attracting merchants, scholars, adventurers, and artists from Europe and beyond. A Calvinist stronghold struggling for independence from Catholic Spain, it attracts a goodly number of Protestant refugees during the Thirty Years War (1618–48). One of these is the “Winter Queen,” Elizabeth of Bohemia, who with her husband (the Elector of Palatine) flees the Catholic forces that have prevailed in her native land. After her husband’s death, Elizabeth settles into a threadbare widowhood, scrounging funds from princes and relations, attempting to marry off her daughters, and dreaming of raising an army that can restore her to the throne. Romance is far from uppermost in the thoughts of this mature and hardheaded stateswoman, and it comes as a surprise to her to find how easily she falls in love with the theology student Pelagius van Overmeer. The surprise is fully justified, for Pelagius is, in fact, an African prince (named Omoluju before his conversion and baptism) who came to Europe as a slave, won his freedom, and turned to scholarship. Highly educated and fluent in Yoruba, Dutch, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, Pelagius is training to become a minister, and his erudition and wit have made him something of a celebrity in Amsterdam. He and Elizabeth are secretly married and have a son, Balthasar, who is kept in hiding for fear of scandal. Secret marriages rarely turn out well, and secret births bring even greater difficulties. Can Elizabeth and Pelagius find peace together? In a continent being torn by one of history’s bloodiest wars, it may be too much to ask.
A bright and engaging portrait of private lives rendered against a broad and vivid canvas of human history.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-618-14912-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
