A complex, informative, and disturbing saga, with cautionary currency for today’s roiling times.
The daughter of an impoverished Eastern European–German shoemaker struggles with issues of ethnic and cultural identity in van Zanten’s historical novel.
Johanna Münzke was born in 1881 in Osterode in the district of Niedersachsen, part of the German Empire. She and her siblings consider themselves full Germans. But when she begins school, and the teachers and students learn her surname is Münzke, they start referring to her with disdain as a “dirty Polak.” This is when she learns that her father’s family was Eastern European, from Pomerania. The Germans had annexed the area and brought it into the fold of the greater German Empire, an action that destroyed her great-grandfather’s prestigious shoemaking business and threw the family into poverty. After his own father’s death, Johanna’s father, Fritz, left Pomerania and settled in Osterode, where he met and married Johanna’s mother. Despite being born in Osterode, Johanna is not “pure” German, and she tries to hide her mixed heritage. History repeats itself when Johanna turns 16, and the Germans revoke Fritz’s cobbler’s license. Distraught, he collapses and dies. With no family income, Johanna embarks on several years’ worth of in-home service jobs. In 1903, at age 23, she scores a job operating an on-site concession for the HBS railroad on a building project that takes her across Germany. She meets the man she will marry, a Dutchman named Hendrik Zondervan who is the project superintendent. In 1917, they move to Holland. Johanna’s story is one of divided national and ethnic loyalties that, during World War II, will fracture her relationships with her children and make her a pariah to her Dutch neighbors. Van Zanten vividly portrays the home front from both the German and the Dutch perspectives. Johanna’s insistence that stories of her beloved countrymen’s atrocities cannot be true is infuriating, even as it adds historical context to the period. Her willful blindness—choosing to believe the German press despite having herself experienced Aryan prejudice against those ethnically “inferior”—makes it difficult to sympathize with an otherwise intelligent and resourceful female protagonist.
A complex, informative, and disturbing saga, with cautionary currency for today’s roiling times.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781592113767
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Addison & Highsmith Publishers
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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