An assured, cleverly plotted piece of historical fiction with an irrepressible female protagonist.
In this delightful debut novel set in the early 19th century, a young woman fights to patent her flax-milling machine.
Ella Kenyon’s grandfather has a dying wish: that she finish designing and engineering the flax-milling device the two of them have struggled to develop. Finishing it represents not only the culmination of their work but the potential to remove herself and her family from the control of her abusive father, Amherst. But Ella is met with all manner of obstacles. The device works but imperfectly and impracticably. To patent the machine, she needs to trust the wealthy Mr. Emerston, who she knows is liable to steal her design. And perhaps more pressing, she must reconfigure her sense of self as aspects of her past—her real mother, her connection to her grandfather’s Native American assistant, Pete—come to light. While patenting a milling device may seem like dull territory for fiction, Lew-Smith’s greatest strength, among many, is ensuring that the plot is dramatic without being exaggerated, intricate without being convoluted. Allegiances shift and mutate, and characters show capacity for change and regret. Most arresting of these is Ella’s flawed and fascinating aunt Lucille, a woman who’d previously been only cold and distant to Ella but who has now taken a sudden interest in her success. When the need to patent the machine forces Ella to travel to Washington City, capital of the new nation, her cadre of friends and family help her get there, but it’s Ella who takes center stage. She’s headstrong and brilliant, unafraid of a scuffle and capable of tenderness beneath her rough exterior. While still more obstacles meet her on the journey—an exhilarating fire in the Pine Barrens, a kidnapping and torturing in Philadelphia—Ella remains steadfast in her determination to see her grandfather’s wish to its conclusion and, most importantly, to never become the victim.
An assured, cleverly plotted piece of historical fiction with an irrepressible female protagonist.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0991341207
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Caspian Press
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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