A silly, featherweight confection that will only appeal to the authors’ many fans.
A mother and daughter team up for another volume of anecdotal stories.
There are countless readers for whom a book is akin to a truffle, a small, sweet, delicate treat lacking in anything particularly sustaining. Often, it’s as much about having others know you’re enjoying it as it is about actually enjoying it. Here, bestselling novelist Scottoline and her daughter Serritella (Have a Nice Guilt Trip, 2014, etc.), both Sunday columnists for the Philadelphia Inquirer, deliver another truffle of a book. It is about nothing but enjoyment, a nudge-nudge, wink-wink narrative about womanhood in all of its messy, wonderful glory (well, “all” from the viewpoint of two well-to-do white women). It is the sixth such book from this mother-and-daughter team, ostensibly in the tradition of humorists like Erma Bombeck. Scottoline and Serritella have yet to reach Bombeck’s level of popularity, but it isn’t for lack of effort—or perhaps it is: many of the sentences (even paragraphs) consist of only a few words: “We get it.” “We rock!” “Like Mensa.” One essay notes that, in disagreements with the power company, they always win: “Because they have the power.” Elsewhere, “I have a gangrene thumb” describes a comical difficulty with planting “a zillion” perennials. Other examples: “She’s like Oprah if Oprah could twerk.” “Woot woot!” “LOL.” “I’m in love. / With my Fitbit. / I’m smitten, which makes me Smitbit. / Or maybe Fitbitten. / Either way, I’m into it….By the way, my dogs do not have Fitbits. / They don’t Fitbite.” The topics are mostly the same as in their previous books, many similar to those Bombeck covered far more dynamically in her many bestsellers. There’s another, more relevant, definition of a truffle: “a strong-smelling underground fungus that resembles an irregular, rough-skinned potato.”
A silly, featherweight confection that will only appeal to the authors’ many fans.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05994-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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