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LITTLE BASTARDS IN SPRINGTIME

Name: LITTLE BASTARDS IN SPRINGTIME
Author: Katja Rudolph
ISBN: 978-1-58642-233-2

by Katja Rudolph ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2015

A first-rate novel about the horrors of nationalism, as moving as it is instructive in its historical import.

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A boy survives the 1992 siege of Sarajevo and finds refuge, if not peace, in North America.

Jevrem Andric is 11 when his family endures four years of “the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern war.” Depicting their suffering through Jevrem’s eyes, Rudolph uses remarkable historical research to craft a deeply affecting psychological portrayal of the cost of war upon one boy, his family and the society they are later thrown into. His mother is Croatian, a pianist; his father is Serb, an activist and journalist. In short time the family goes from protesting in the street and playing concerts to starving in a basement without medicine. Jevrem witnesses rape and sees his friends killed. Half his family, which includes his war-hero Communist grandmother, an older brother, and two younger sisters, dies in the war, a fight among “Muslim paramilitaries, Croatian paramilitaries, the JNA, Serbian police, and irregulars.” The dead haunt Jevrem after his escape to Canada, where he gets high and robs people in Toronto with fellow refugees who dub themselves “the Bastards of Yugoslavia” because “it’s what the nationalists who took over our country” called children of mixed parentage. Rudolph deeply inhabits Jevrem, a highly intelligent teen with PTSD, modulating the prose subtly as the boy ages, showing great restraint as a stylist in order to let the effects of war drive each scene. After a brutal stint in juvenile detention, Jevrem finds himself once again in an idealistic family placing hope in revolution, ending a story sure to make readers tremble at the cost of war paid by children “scattered across the world, figuring things out, finding stuff to do, forgetting and remembering, trying to get by.”

A first-rate novel about the horrors of nationalism, as moving as it is instructive in its historical import.

Pub Date: April 7, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-58642-233-2

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Steerforth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.