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
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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