A historical novel that connects some dots but not all.
Kate’s adult fiction debut explores the intriguing world of Venetian orphanages that teach music to children.
Violetta and Mino are foundlings entrusted to the Ospedale degli Incurabili, originally a convent-run hospital for syphilitics. Violetta does not know who her parents are, but when she was 5, she witnessed Mino’s abandonment by his mother. Now teenagers who have met sporadically and secretly on the Ospedale’s roof, each must follow the destiny preordained by their social status in the arcane caste system of 1730s Venice. Violetta is training to join the Ospedale’s coro, the all-female ensemble that performs liturgical music to raise funds for the church. The prospects of less talented orphan girls are limited to arranged marriage, the convent, or menial servitude. As a boy, Mino is not allowed to study music, although he is gifted and has surreptitiously taught himself to play the violin. (He is also a self-taught luthier.) Male orphans like Mino are apprenticed when they age out. Kate (Unforgiven, 2015, etc.) does not stray far from the young adult staples of angst-y teens and conflicted love. Rejected by Violetta, Mino opts for Venetian street hustles in lieu of apprenticeship. Violetta is torn between the coro and the lure of professional singing, between Mino and a dashing older impresario who can make her a star. The contradictions posed by Venetian culture vis-à-vis the arts and morality are well-depicted: Coro musicians are revered, but their lives are constrained; professional musicians are viewed with contempt, and, with few exceptions, their performances are illegal. Strict moral codes ostensibly govern Venice, but the custom of wearing masks most of the year encourages all manner of anonymous vice and licentiousness, which then feeds the Ospedale system with more STD patients and abandoned, illegitimate progeny. Violetta and Mino, though, seem thinly motivated. Lacking clearly defined goals, each too often seems attracted by the latest shiny object.
A historical novel that connects some dots but not all.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1257-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
A mother and her child-prodigy daughter struggle to survive the Holocaust by telling stories and remembering the power of...
Rosner’s debut novel is a World War II story with a Room-like twist, one that also deftly examines the ways in which art and imagination can sustain us.
Five-year-old Shira is a prodigy. She hears entire musical passages in her head, which “take shape and pulse through her, quiet at first, then building in intensity and growing louder.” But making sounds is something Shira is not permitted to do. She and her mother, Róża, are Jews who are hiding in a barn in German-occupied Poland. Soldiers have shot Róża’s husband and dragged her parents away, and after a narrow escape, mother and daughter cower in a hayloft day and night, relying on the farmer and his wife to keep them safe from neighbors and passing patrols. The wife sneaks Shira outside for fresh air; the husband visits Róża late at night in the hayloft to exact his price. To keep Shira occupied and quiet the rest of the time, Róża spins tales of a little girl and a yellow bird in an enchanted but silent garden menaced by giants; only the bird is allowed to sing. But when Róża is offered a chance to hide Shira in an orphanage, she must weigh her daughter’s safety against her desire to keep the girl close. Rosner builds the tension as the novel progresses, wisely moving the action out of the barn before the premise grows tired or repetitive. This is a Holocaust novel, but it’s also an effective work of suspense, and Rosner’s understanding of how art plays a role in our lives, even at the worst of times, is impressive.
A mother and her child-prodigy daughter struggle to survive the Holocaust by telling stories and remembering the power of music.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-17977-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.
A novel of sharply drawn character studies immersed in more than 250 hard, transformative years in the African-American diaspora.
Gyasi’s debut novel opens in the mid-1700s in what is now Ghana, as tribal rivalries are exploited by British and Dutch colonists and slave traders. The daughter of one tribal leader marries a British man for financial expediency, then learns that the “castle” he governs is a holding dungeon for slaves. (When she asks what’s held there, she’s told “cargo.”) The narrative soon alternates chapters between the Ghanans and their American descendants up through the present day. On either side of the Atlantic, the tale is often one of racism, degradation, and loss: a slave on an Alabama plantation is whipped “until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby”; a freedman in Baltimore fears being sent back South with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; a Ghanan woman is driven mad from the abuse of a missionary and her husband’s injury in a tribal war; a woman in Harlem is increasingly distanced from (and then humiliated by) her husband, who passes as white. Gyasi is a deeply empathetic writer, and each of the novel’s 14 chapters is a savvy character portrait that reveals the impact of racism from multiple perspectives. It lacks the sweep that its premise implies, though: while the characters share a bloodline, and a gold-flecked stone appears throughout the book as a symbolic connector, the novel is more a well-made linked story collection than a complex epic. Yet Gyasi plainly has the talent to pull that off: “I will be my own nation,” one woman tells a British suitor early on, and the author understands both the necessity of that defiance and how hard it is to follow through on it.
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94713-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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