Deeply moving and personal, told with restraint and great skill.
A finely crafted story of a young priest’s crisis of faith (and love) is the latest success from novelist (and ex-priest) L’Heureux (Having Everything, 1999, etc.).
Anybody who was ordained in the 1960s faced pretty stiff casualty rates from the start, and Father LeBlanc—idealistic, intellectual, liberal, and more than a tad naive—is the sort who is bound to find Church life hard going at the best of times. Assigned as the curate to a large working-class parish in South Boston, he alienates his superiors (and not a few of his parishioners) by preaching and counseling against the Vietnam War, segregated schools, and the pope’s condemnation of birth control. Reassigned to a small parish in an out-of-the-way resort town in New Hampshire, he is forced to cultivate the virtue of solitude as well as humility. His pastor, Father Moriarity, is an invalid dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease, lovingly tended by Rose, the parish housekeeper. Rose’s teenaged daughter Mandy is somewhat wild in the manner of teenaged girls, and one day she overdoses on cocaine. Pronounced dead by the doctor, she regains consciousness after Rose prays over her. A miracle? Just good fortune? Father LeBlanc (who was present at the scene) is in no doubt whatever and becomes more and more obsessed with Rose, whom he believes to be a saint. Around the same time, Annaka (a somewhat disturbed woman from the parish) develops an obsession of her own—with Father LeBlanc. Eventually, Father LeBlanc gets himself into trouble with both Rose and Annaka, and the miracle turns out to be much more problematic than it first appeared. Father LeBlanc has to decide whether he should remain a priest—and what he wants to do if he leaves—and, more importantly, whether he still believes in God.
Deeply moving and personal, told with restraint and great skill.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-87113-857-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A bold, fertile work lit by powerful images, often consumed by debate, almost old-school in its feminist commitment.
Esther, the Old Testament teenager who reluctantly married a Persian king and saved her people, is connected across the ages to two more contemporary women in a sinuous, thoughtful braid of women’s unceasing struggles for liberty and identity.
Biblical Esther, second-wave feminist Vee, and contemporary mother-of-two Lily are the women whose narrative strands and differing yet sometimes parallel dilemmas are interwoven in Solomon’s (Leaving Lucy Pear, 2016, etc.) questing, unpredictable new novel. All three are grappling—some more dangerously than others—with aspects of male power versus their own self-determination. Esther, selected from 40 virgins to be the second queen—after her predecessor, Vashti, was banished (or worse)—is the strangest. Her magical powers can bring on a shocking physical transformation or reanimate a skeletal bird, yet she is still a prisoner in a gilded cage, mother to an heir, frustrated daughter of an imperiled tribe. Vee, wife of an ambitious senator in 1970s Washington, finds herself a player in a House of Cards–type scenario, pressured toward sexual humiliation by her unscrupulous husband. Lily, in 21st-century Brooklyn, has chosen motherhood over work and is fretting about the costumes for her two daughters to wear at the Purim carnival honoring Esther. Alongside questions of male dominance, issues of sexuality arise often, as do female communities, from Esther’s slave sisters to Vee’s consciousness-raising groups to Lily’s sewing circle. And while layers of overlap continue among the three women's stories—second wives, sewing, humming—so do subtly different individual choices. Finely written and often vividly imagined, this is a cerebral, interior novel devoted to the notion of womanhood as a composite construction made up of myriad stories and influences.
A bold, fertile work lit by powerful images, often consumed by debate, almost old-school in its feminist commitment.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-25701-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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