A strong, evocative sequel that follows an interracial couple coping with family and social complications in New York.
An interracial couple adjusts to married life in the 1950s in Garner’s (Walk on Water, 2013, etc.) multilayered sequel to her 2011 debut novel, Solomon’s Blues.
After falling in love in a small Texas town, Esther and Taylor Payne relocate to the bohemian New York City neighborhood of Greenwich Village, where their relationship is not only legally permitted, but also generally accepted. Deeply in love, they enjoy a life filled with material comforts (Taylor joins a law firm) and the support of Esther’s nearby extended family. But Esther can’t escape the reality that she remains a black woman living in a white world. She tries to adapt to her new role as a society wife, sporting the proper hairstyles and wearing the right clothes. Yet while she changes externally, her faith endures and her commitment to family stays strong. Although she and Taylor are well-matched, he continues to be estranged from his family, a situation Esther fails to accept. Her determination to reunite Taylor with his uncle and sister endangers her marriage. Garner presents a well-written, descriptive novel, choosing a setting that allows her to address many of the cultural changes of the postwar era. The appealing story of Esther and Taylor’s love offers a peek into larger political and social issues. For example, World War II still haunts Esther and her friends (“No one was willing to let himself or herself believe in peace. We just hoped for it, while we built bomb shelters and practiced air-raid drills”). Garner peppers the narrative with cogent tidbits about national events, deftly working them in between a whirl of social obligations, Esther’s recollections of home, and steamy moments of lovemaking. For example, a group of wives discusses the polio vaccine, and Taylor rejoices when the verdict of Brown v. Board of Education is returned. In addition, Esther’s circle of acquaintances richly represents the melting pot that is American society, ranging from Holocaust survivors to Russian Marxist landlords. At the heart of the novel lie Esther and Taylor, well-drawn characters who are admirable yet endearingly fallible.
A strong, evocative sequel that follows an interracial couple coping with family and social complications in New York.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-7303-1
Page Count: 326
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2015
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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