Despite occasionally heavy-handed symbolism and anachronistic language, a riotous panorama of a society in chaos.
Scott (Cassandra, Lost, 2004, etc.) traces the intersecting paths of a runaway slave, an ex-belle and a Southern cracker in Civil War North Carolina.
The daughter of a former slave-owner whose failing fortunes have taken them to a mining town, Eugenia Spotswood still pines for her old life in Wilmington. Instead of receiving gentleman callers and revering the memory of a dead mother whose grievances against her husband were expressed in too-vigorous combing of her daughter’s “unnaturally” curly hair, Eugenia is condemned to slatternly drudgery, keeping house and treading long hours on “rockers” harvesting gold dust. Her only respite is Tom, sold to the mines after running away from a plantation near Chapel Hill. Purchased by Spotswood, Tom endears himself to Eugenia, and soon even abolitionist tongues are wagging. When impending war bankrupts the mine, Eugenia helps him flee and absconds herself in another direction with Spotswood’s gold so she won’t have to follow Papa on yet another doomed odyssey. Tom finds work and friendship as a turpentiner and later as a Union scout. Meanwhile, Clyde, the dirt-farmer’s son who caught Tom back in Chapel Hill, flees North after his draft-dodging and slap-happy Pa is killed. Clyde likes the Union soldier’s life until he’s waylaid in a barbaric POW camp (Scott excels at descriptions of gore and putrescence) and winds up, naked and frostbitten, at the house of abolitionist Aunt Baker. And who should Clyde meet there but Eugenia, who was robbed of her ill-gotten gold and became a passionate nurse to the wounded runaways and deserters Aunt Baker harbors in her cellar? When gangrene returns despite an amputation, Clyde insists on seeing his mother before undergoing more surgery. Hoping for news of Tom, Eugenia escorts Clyde home. As the war ends, Tom is also headed for Chapel Hill, bereft of everything except a dead friend’s infant daughter.
Despite occasionally heavy-handed symbolism and anachronistic language, a riotous panorama of a society in chaos.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-425-21252-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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 TO SCREEN
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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