Sharp storytelling augments this novel of single-minded perseverance.
An old man recounts his youthful struggles in this winding novel set in New Bern, North Carolina.
Joshua Jordan may be old, and though his life wasn’t easy, he lived a full one. Born just after the Civil War, Joshua, who’s African-American, was born a free man—the first in his family. After his parents died of cholera, his uncle Levi took him in. Levi works for a surly plantation owner, Captain Bigly, and when 12-year-old Joshua rushes through a job on the plantation, resulting in an accident that leaves Captain Bigley’s daughter, Melinda Mae, in a coma. Joshua goes looking for the Swamp Woman, a local healer, who eventually heals the girl. Seeing the power of the Swamp Woman, Joshua wants to treat patients, too, but he soon finds that the road to becoming a doctor is much harder than he thought. His education is subpar, he doesn’t have money, benefactors abandon him, he faces extreme discrimination, and yet...Joshua still works toward his ultimate goal of practicing medicine. Old Joshua soon realizes that his life isn’t over—there is still another chapter (or even two!) to come. Dempsey (The Butterfly, 2017, etc.) is a keen and ferocious storyteller. Frequent flashbacks guide readers toward the satisfying scene of Joshua’s epiphany. The prose is lush and fulfilling: “I missed my own country, flat and sandy, but filled with pines, magnolias, cypress and live oaks hung with moss. I missed the fields covered with cotton plants, plump with the snow-white puffs of cotton waiting to be picked.” As Joshua recounts his past, it motivates him to encourage youngsters to realize their own purposes. Readers may feel similarly inspired. Though the included illustrations aren’t needed, they add texture.
Sharp storytelling augments this novel of single-minded perseverance.Pub Date: May 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4907-7295-0
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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