An entertaining comedy of errors that should especially appeal to Christian readers.
A local preacher’s simple decision turns an entire small town against him in this novel.
Everyone in Aucoin, Louisiana, thinks that Brad Johnson was born to be the preacher of Lee Community Church. Lately though, Brad’s life at church has become monotonous; he’s been longing to go on a vacation with his wife, Allison, and get away from “the sheer agony of trying to change the order of the worship service.” Behind a lot of that angst is the gruff and very traditional deacon named Earl Bishop. Like the church’s other deacons, Earl has become concerned about the amount of money the Christian congregation is bringing in and he blames Brad’s lackluster sermons. When Brad finds a $100 bill on the floor of his office, he never intends to steal from his own struggling church, but only a few hours later he finds himself needing to spend the money in an emergency at a gas station—a move that will set off Earl and the town’s gossip mill. By the end of a single day, the whole town believes that Brad has been driving through New Orleans with women passed out in the back of his car, doing drugs in his front yard, gambling with church money, and cheating on his wife with gas station clerk Sally Mae Watson—only some of which is true. For his novel, Frady (co-author: Staccato, 2011) sets up an impressive domino effect of mistakes and assumptions; he makes it enjoyable to see so much trouble stem from such a small decision. He also offers plenty of humor, pitting the sweet Brad against infuriating townspeople and putting him completely out of his element. (“I didn’t even know there were different kinds of lottery tickets,” Brad exclaims to a crowd at a gas station while trying his hand at a new vice.) At times, the author goes a bit too far with the frustrating small-town mentality—from the beginning, it’s hard to understand why Brad would put up with his deacons in the first place—but funny, fast-paced dialogue overall makes for rapid jokes and mostly lovable characters.
An entertaining comedy of errors that should especially appeal to Christian readers.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5127-9582-0
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2017
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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