Another dazzling mix of history, romance, and the occult from Riley, a writer who excels at getting the background right and creating strong intelligent heroines (The Serpent Garden, 1996, etc.). France in 1556 is a troubled place. The Protestants are growing in power; King Henri II ignores his queen, Catherine de MÇdici, in favor of his mistress, Diane de Poitiers; the Dauphin is betrothed to Mary, Queen of Scots, a potentially powerful alliance, but he’s a dull and sickly boy. The noble de la Roche family has its troubles too: the parents hope the arranged marriage of their daughter Sibille to brutish but rich Villasse will pay their debts. But Sibille, an unconventional beauty and aspiring poet with large feet but a courageous heart and a good mind, fires a gun at Villasse and, thinking she’s killed him, flees to her aunt Pauline in OrlÇans. There, she accidentally acquires a box that contains the head of Menander, the “Master of all Desires,” who grants wishes in exchange for souls. Meanwhile, Nostradamus, who has seen the future of France (it’s not good), has been summoned by Catherine, who also wants him to predict the future. Not only that, but she, too, wants Menander’s head, and Sibille soon finds herself caught between the queen’s followers, who insist that she come to court, and Villasse, who wants her killed. Sibille falls in love with Nicholas Montevert, a banker’s son, when he saves her from attack by Villasse’s hired henchman. But true love never runs smoothly: as sorcerers concoct deadly potions, Nicholas is banished; the queen plots her rival’s death; and Sibille, hostage to Menander after she opened the box, is soon in mortal danger. Nostradamus can help rescue Sibille, but France is about to be torn apart by civil war. Stylish and intelligent historical fiction that makes even the supernatural credible.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-88450-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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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