by Marion Joseph ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
An earnest and often engaging story about loss and family.
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Joseph’s debut novel tells the story of an elderly couple seeking closure on the tragedies of their lives.
On New York’s Long Island in 1996, Holocaust survivors Eva and Max Stern are about to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. They want to get their entire extended family together, including their granddaughter, Amber; their estranged daughter, Beth; and their Israeli relative Ilan Stern, who’s just moved to America to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They even post advertisements in various countries throughout Europe in the hopes of tracking down any surviving relatives. The action then flashes back to Hungary in the 1940s, where Eva, 17 and pregnant, goes into hiding and gives birth before she’s separated from her child and sent to Auschwitz. Meanwhile, Max, a violinist whose dreams were shattered by anti-Semitism, ends up in the same camp with his family. He’s soon left with only his cousin, Sam, with whom he makes a survival pact. Max and Eva manage to survive the war, and they later meet in a displaced-persons camp, marry, and immigrate to America, where they struggle to build a new life together after losing almost everything. Back in 1996, as the loose ends of the couple’s lives are tied up, can they regain what they thought was lost? Joseph’s prose is measured and expressive, as when the Sterns receive their first introduction to New York, “where people laughed at perplexing jokes…..Where left-over food was tossed thoughtlessly into garbage cans, and lights burned twenty-four hours in tall buildings, even at night when people slept.” The book straddles several genres—it’s a novel of the Holocaust and of the immigrant experience, as well as a family saga—but it manages to feel intimate and contained, despite its length. The execution is uneven at times, however. Specifically, the story might have benefited from more character interiority; readers may sometimes feel as if they’re watching Eva, Max, and the others moving around on a set, instead of experiencing the characters’ emotional lives as they live them. Still, the narrative remains compelling enough to keep readers turning pages.
An earnest and often engaging story about loss and family.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 437
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Robinne Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 13, 2017
A fascinating, thought-provoking, genre-bending romantic read.
When Solène Marchand takes her 12-year-old daughter to a concert by the hottest boy band on the planet, she doesn't expect to fall in love with one of the singers.
Middle-aged art gallery owner Solène hasn’t dated since her divorce, but when her ex-husband buys their daughter and a group of her friends tickets to Vegas and a backstage concert experience, then backs out at the last minute, she steps in as escort. The five guys in the wildly popular English boy band August Moon appeal to women of all ages, but Hayes, the brains behind the group’s success, flirts with Solène at the concert meet and greet, invites them to a party after the show, then pursues her once she gets back to Los Angeles. He’s only 20 and he’s incredibly famous; his attention is flattering and heady. The two fall into an affair that’s supposed to be light and easy, but before long they can’t ignore their intense emotional attachment. Solène is hesitant to tell her daughter, but when she procrastinates, Isabelle learns about it through an online tabloid, which damages their relationship and leaves Solène open to censure from her ex. Then, once the affair goes viral, she experiences the darker side of Hayes’ fan base. What started out as a jaunty adventure turns into an emotionally fraught journey, and Solène must decide what she’s willing to risk for her happiness and what she won’t risk for her daughter’s. Actress Lee, who appeared in Fifty Shades Darker, debuts with a beautifully written novel that explores sex, love, romance, and fantasy in moving, insightful ways while also examining a woman’s struggle with aging and sexism, with a nod at the tension between celebrity and privacy.
A fascinating, thought-provoking, genre-bending romantic read.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12590-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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More About This Book
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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