A fine, compassionate, elegiac combination of human and courtroom drama—the author’s best yet.
Another inventive, nuanced historical novel from McMahon (The Rose of Sebastopol, 2009, etc.), again focused on a progressive female protagonist constrained by the expectations of her era.
Evelyn Gifford, 30 and one of England’s first female lawyers, must not only struggle against mockery and prejudice at work but also grapple with her grief over the loss of her beloved brother James; she’s still bereft six-and-a-half years after he was killed in World War I. Evelyn’s cash-strapped London household, which includes her widowed mother, aunt and elderly grandmother, is further burdened by the arrival of Meredith and Edmund Duffy, James’ hitherto unknown lover and illegitimate child. McMahon captures the conflicts of class and impoverishment, work and privilege in telling detail through Evelyn’s professional dilemmas, which take her to slums, prisons, orphanages and society drawing rooms. At home, Meredith undermines James’ memory with her shocking recollections, but Evelyn is drawn to Edmund as the son she believes she will never have, since almost an entire generation of men has been lost to the war. Enter barrister Nicholas Thorne—“beautiful, intact, youngish…therefore a rarity”—who approaches Evelyn because she’s involved in the trial of an ex-soldier (employed by one of Thorne’s clients) accused of killing his wife. Quickly, Evelyn finds herself obsessed with the barrister; though engaged to another, he personifies all her yearnings for sexual and emotional fulfillment. But larger, darker, more complex forces may deny Evelyn easy solutions or happy endings, although they may not obstruct a resolute woman from moving forward.
A fine, compassionate, elegiac combination of human and courtroom drama—the author’s best yet.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-399-15622-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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