A muddled story that mixes trenchant themes with melodramatic plotting.
Van Sickle’s debut YA novel traces how a young man of privilege makes his way from prep-school to the front lines of World War II.
In 1942, Charles “Charlie” Trammel is the son of a wealthy, East Coast U.S senator and attends a school named after his own family, firmly aware of his silver-spoon position and feeling somewhat lost. The novel alternates between scenes of Charlie and other soldiers in 1944, about to disembark in Normandy on D-Day, and his previous development at home and school. He grows up in a chilly, mirthless mansion with his patrician grandfather and grandmother, alongside his own mother and father. His mother, Mary, is a strong-willed, kindhearted Brooklynite of Irish descent, who gets in a fair amount of disagreements with her blue-blooded in-laws. Charlie attempts to balance the two sides of his family heritage by spending as much time as possible with his mother’s family, who are considerably less well-off, giving him an up-close view of how the other half lives. He begins school at prestigious Trammel Academy without fear of being drafted into the military and with assurance that his name will probably get him into any Ivy League school he desires. Most of his growth as a person takes place at the academy, as he learns much under fiery classics teacher Mrs. Verardi and finds a foil in sneering fellow student Jackson Inverness. Van Sickle smartly centers discussions of privilege, class, honor, and race within the plot. Even so, these discussions often feel clunky and inorganic to Charlie’s first-person narrative voice. The author often falls into the trap of telling instead of showing, rendering the prose didactic and not letting readers draw their own conclusions. Copy editing errors (“And continued to walk passed us like he was Christ on water”) and multiple continuity issues involving dates somewhat mar the reading experience. Mrs. Verardi centers the best scenes of the novel with lively dialogue and a compelling back story. Van Sickle broadly sketches other characters, though, as either purely good or purely malevolent, making the plot largely predictable. That said, the author does have a couple unexpected twists up her sleeve.
A muddled story that mixes trenchant themes with melodramatic plotting.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5197-9777-3
Page Count: 166
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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