31286676.399 Estleman, Loren D. THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN MOVING PICTURE ASSOCIATION Estleman has switched fictional settings before from Prohibition Detroit (Whiskey River, 1990, etc.) to the Hollywood of early silents, as in Billy Gashade (1997). His latest, set largely in 1913, is something of a sequel to Billy. Burgeoning but unpublished young writer Dmitri Andreivitch Pulski, who admires Jack London and writes under the pen name Tom Boston, has garnered 172 rejections and, waiting for his ship to come in, works for his father, who owns the Sierra Nevada Ice Company. One day after he’s just helped cut up eight tons of ice from a frozen lake, a request comes in from a Hollywood studio for ten tons of same. His father sends Tom/Dmitri down to Hollywood to check on the deal. Tom’s romantic interest is exotic blossom Adele Varga, the secretary/leading lady for director Buck Bensinger, whose Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association is shooting The Trail of “98, the Alaskan gold rush tale that made all that ice necessary. When Tom says he’s a writer and that Jack London will undoubtedly sue Buck for lifting his plot, Buck hires Tom to sponge all the Jack London out of the script. Meanwhile, the sheriff threatens to put Buck’s equipment on the auction block if he doesn’t pay off a printer. On his new job, Tom the innocent wanders about the set with Adele, while Estleman packs in sparkling filler. A leap ahead to 1927 tells of Tom/Pulski’s visit as a big-time realtor to Hearst’s castle at San Simeon; then it’s back to 1913 and Buck’s fight against the Edison Trust. When his leading cowboy star dies on heroin, Buck hires a famous desperado just released from San Quentin to replace him. Buck takes to drink; Adele turns producer and makes a star of desperado J. W. Starling. Jump to 1948 for a nostalgic recap. Masterful description floats through a story that’s held together by sheer charm.
Pub Date: April 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-86676-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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