Cantor has done her research thoroughly to produce another captivating historical novel. Excellent writing, unusual...
Moving seamlessly between Austria in 1938 and Los Angeles in 1989, this novel connects a grim history to a more hopeful present.
In Austria, the Nazis begin to roust Jews from positions, homes, and safety. Kristoff, an 18-year-old German, finds an apprenticeship with Frederick Faber, a Jewish engraver of stamps and documents. Frederick, his wife, and their two daughters, 13-year-old Miriam and 17-year-old Elena, become the family Kristoff never had. He comes to respect their traditions and forms a special bond with Elena, who, unbeknownst to her father, secretly practices engraving with Kristoff, a skill they use to forge papers to get Jews to safer countries. In present-day LA, Katie Nelson, soon to be divorced, is cleaning her apartment and finds the stamp collection her father passed along to her when he went into a home for Alzheimer's care. Determined to find something of value in his collection—her father always said he hoped to find a “gem”—she consults Benjamin Grossman, a philatelist, who unearths an unopened letter with a unique Austrian stamp. Benjamin keeps Katie apprised of the results of his research. They discover that Frederick Faber engraved the stamp and that it is addressed to one of his daughters, Fraulein Faber, with no first name. Benjamin finds the former Fraulein Faber in Cardiff, Wales, and he plans a trip to visit her, hoping to unravel the mystery of the stamp in which a tiny symbol is engraved. He offers Katie a ticket—he has lots of free miles—to accompany him. They hope to return home with at least a story about the stamp for her father to enjoy before his memory is totally gone. The past gives up its secrets reluctantly but give them up it does. Katie’s father truly has found his gem, and eventually Katie recognizes hers. Cantor (The Hours Count, 2015, etc.) has mixed historical background with fictional characters for a believable, engaging tale in which the past indeed reconciles with the present.
Cantor has done her research thoroughly to produce another captivating historical novel. Excellent writing, unusual storytelling, and sympathetic characters make a winning combination.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-18567-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
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. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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