A demanding but rewarding religious story.
This novel, set alternately in Uganda and California, offers a paradigm of struggle between faith and the secular world.
Mendenhall’s (Michael and the Ice Princess, 2011) protagonist is Stephen O’Connell, a Mexican-Irish-American who’s a talented musician and actor. In the 1970s, he finds Christ and enrolls in Scholars Bible College, but it turns out to be a very conservative, rigid, airless place with teachers and students who often seem to hew the letter of the Bible, instead of its spirit. Stephen doesn’t last very long at the school, but during his time there, he does make fast friends, including Bryce Everett and Margaret Whitman, who reappear later in the story. Later, in the 1990s, Stephen and his wife, Julie (along with their son, Sam), are in Uganda as missionaries and AIDS workers. Readers are reminded that back in the 1970s, Uganda, under the rule of Idi Amin, was a place of unspeakable atrocities; in the ’90s, there’s genocide in neighboring Rwanda. As portrayed in this novel, Africa is a beautiful but tragic place, and the O’Connells are right in the thick of what’s happening within it. Other characters in Uganda include school headmaster Geoffrey Mahoro and his niece, Charity Ntambara, who was raped by Amin’s soldiers and bears the spiritual and cultural scars years later. Julie is nearly killed by a religious fanatic, and yet another religious fanatic comes after administrative assistant Madeleine Everett later, back in California. This is a complex book, and even the title itself presents a puzzle and a challenge. That said, the book is well-organized and engagingly written. Its characters are believable throughout, and readers will have sympathy for even the flawed ones (such as Madeleine). Mendenhall is a believer in the Christian faith, but her work doesn’t come across as Pollyannish or polemical. Indeed, there are no easy answers here, and certainly no deus ex machina. The O’Connells are the closest thing to true saints in Mendenhall’s world, but she still succeeds, for the most part, in making them seem human. Even non-believers will find this world engrossing, particularly as it may be one that’s new to them.
A demanding but rewarding religious story.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5195-0260-5
Page Count: 374
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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