Innocence, devastation and restored hope cycle through two British couples after the men go to France to fight World War I and the women cope with their absence in very different ways. This is Young's first adult novel to be published in the United States.
An epic love story, a grim war chronicle, a class study, a heartwarming tale of overcoming—London native Young's page-turner has Masterpiece Classic written all over it. Riley Purefoy, a bright, wide-eyed, working class boy, falls for the sweet, privileged and equally adoring Nadine Waveney after stumbling into a childhood job posing for her neighbor, a famous painter. At 18, still a prize model and still in love with Nadine, Riley enlists to flee from an embarrassing encounter with a gay student painter. He proves a good soldier and rises in rank, but immersed in daily traumas, sinks into disillusionment and then worse after a part of his face is shot off. Meanwhile, Riley's battle-scarred commanding officer, Peter Locke, is consumed by alcohol. Back home, while Nadine works as a volunteer nurse for returning soldiers, Peter's wife Julia obsesses over her looks after being rebuffed by him during a short leave. She risks a very different kind of plastic surgery than a devoted doctor performs on Riley to reconstruct his jaw. While following the conventions of Victorian-era fiction (unbeknownst to him, Riley's caregiver is Peter's cousin), Young brings a modern, frill-free sensibility to the material. There's considerably less sentimentality than you usually encounter in such stories. Young, a graceful and light-handed writer, offers a powerful account of war, and her detailed descriptions of the experimental reconstructive surgery add a compelling element to the story.
A literate, moving wartime tale in which love triumphs over despair.Pub Date: May 31, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-199714-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION
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In this follow-up to the widely read The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018), a young concentration camp survivor is sentenced to 15 years’ hard labor in a Russian gulag.
The novel begins with the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops in 1945. In the camp, 16-year-old Cecilia "Cilka" Klein—one of the Jewish prisoners introduced in Tattooist—was forced to become the mistress of two Nazi commandants. The Russians accuse her of collaborating—they also think she might be a spy—and send her to the Vorkuta Gulag in Siberia. There, another nightmarish scenario unfolds: Cilka, now 18, and the other women in her hut are routinely raped at night by criminal-class prisoners with special “privileges”; by day, the near-starving women haul coal from the local mines in frigid weather. The narrative is intercut with Cilka’s grim memories of Auschwitz as well as her happier recollections of life with her parents and sister before the war. At Vorkuta, her lot improves when she starts work as a nurse trainee at the camp hospital under the supervision of a sympathetic woman doctor who tries to protect her. Cilka also begins to feel the stirrings of romantic love for Alexandr, a fellow prisoner. Though believing she is cursed, Cilka shows great courage and fortitude throughout: Indeed, her ability to endure trauma—as well her heroism in ministering to the sick and wounded—almost defies credulity. The novel is ostensibly based on a true story, but a central element in the book—Cilka’s sexual relationship with the SS officers—has been challenged by the Auschwitz Memorial Research Center and by the real Cilka’s stepson, who says it is false. As in Tattooist, the writing itself is workmanlike at best and often overwrought.
Though gripping, even moving at times, the novel doesn’t do justice to the solemn history from which it is drawn.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-26570-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Categories: RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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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 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Categories: RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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