Workmanlike and less riveting than the subject matter.
Clayton’s (Beautiful Exiles, 2018, etc.) novel about the Kindertransport program joins the recent spate of Holocaust books (from All the Light We Cannot See to The Tattooist of Auschwitz) that allow readers to identity with heroes and survivors instead of victims.
The real-life heroine here is Truus Wijsmuller, the Dutch Christian woman instrumental in smuggling approximately 10,000 children out of the Reich and into England through the Kindertransport. The villain is the infamous Adolph Eichmann. Early in his career Eichmann authored the influential paper “The Jewish Problem,” about how to rid the Reich of Jews. After Germany took over Austria he landed a powerful position in Vienna. In 1938, Truus met with Eichmann, who offered what he assumed was an impossible deal: If she could arrange papers for exactly 600 healthy children to travel in one week’s time—on the Sabbath, when Jewish law forbids travel—he would allow safe passage. With help from British activists, Truus successfully made the arrangements and found refuge for all 600 children in England. Clayton intersects these historical figures and events with fictional characters trapped in Vienna. Aspiring playwright Stephan, 15 years old when the novel begins in 1936, comes from a wealthy Jewish family, manufacturers of highly prized chocolate candies. The Nazis strip ownership of the chocolate factory from Stephan’s father and hand it to Stephan’s Aryan Uncle Michael. A guilty collaborator torn between greed and love, Michael is the novel’s most realistically portrayed character, neither good nor entirely evil. Sensitive, brilliant, and precocious, Stephan is naturally drawn to equally sensitive, brilliant, and precocious Žofie-Helene, a math genius whose anti-Nazi father died under questionable circumstances and whose journalist mother writes the outspokenly anti-Nazi articles about actual events, like Britain’s limiting Jewish immigration and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, that punctuate the plot. After Kristallnacht Stephan ends up hiding in Vienna’s sewers (a weird nod to Orson Welles in The Third Man), and Žofie-Helene’s mother is arrested. Will Stephan and Žofie-Helene end up among the children Truus saves?
Workmanlike and less riveting than the subject matter.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-294693-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Despite clashes with his own superiors as well as with French foes, the durable British hero of Cornwell's splendid series (Sharpe's Devil, 1992, etc.) soldiers on during a bloody turning-point campaign in the Peninsular War. In the spring of 1811, Captain Richard Sharpe and his riflemen are reconnoitering the craggy borderland through which Napoleon's troops may launch another invasion of Portugal from their bases in Spain. The patrol surprises a band of dragoons who've been pillaging a mountain village, and Sharpe (an officer but not a gentleman, commissioned from the ranks) orders the execution of two rapists. The summary shootings earn him the personal hatred of the dead men's preternaturally vicious commanding officer, General Guy Loup of the feared Wolf Brigade. Back in camp, an unrepentant Sharpe is detailed to train an Irish guards company dispatched for geopolitical reasons from Spain's royal court to Viscount Wellington's coalition forces. Meanwhile, Loup, with inside help from his mistress, Juanita de Elia (a well-born Spanish courtesan who loves an expatriate Irish lord serving under Wellington), stages a night raid on the fort held by Sharpe and his outmanned crew. The defenders repulse this assault with sizable losses on both sides, but Sharpe learns he's being groomed as a scapegoat, again for reasons that have more to do with diplomatic exigencies than miliary competence. In a savage three-day engagement fought around the Fuentes de Onore, he redeems himself by beating back a climactic French charge and dispatching his sworn enemy in hand-to-hand combat described with as vivid a brutality as readers are likely to find this side of a forensic reference book. More great adventure from one of the most accomplished and stylish storytellers now writing. This time, Sharpe's new print appearance coincides with Masterpiece Theatre's adaptation of three previous books in the series.
Pub Date: May 24, 1995
ISBN: 0060932287
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
If Clive Barker ever writes a historical novel, he’ll be hard pressed to invent horrors more lurid than the rotting corpses and dangling viscera that grace, so to speak, this lurid and fascinating second novel from Holman (A Stolen Tongue, 1997). Teenaged Gustine (the —dress lodger—), a prostitute whose “master” garbs her in finery in order to attract the lust of well-paying gentry, is the focal point of this high-energy melodrama, set in the English riverside city of Sunderland in 1831—a year when a plague of “cholera morbus” decimates the populace, and engages the initially reluctant services of Henry Chiver, a young physician hoping to specialize in diseases of the heart but compromised by fallout from the scandal also involving the notorious “body snatchers” Burke and Hare, which had caused him to leave Edinburgh in disgrace. Holman’s busy plot also involves Chiver’s idealistic fiancÇe Audrey Place, a progressive young woman who pits herself against the plague’s root causes—poverty and uncleanliness; Gustine’s blackhearted procurer Whilky Robinson, along with his beloved pet ferret Mike; and a mute, one-eyed old woman (known locally as the —Eye—) employed by Whilky to keep watch on Gustine’s nocturnal wanderings. The interactions of these and several other remarkably complex characters occur in a context of deepening fear and conflict, exacerbated by the belief of Sunderland’s poor that the medical establishment casually sacrifices them to aid its researches; by Henry’s increasingly guilty conscience, and by Gustine’s efforts to protect—from both death and doctors—her illegitimate baby, an anatomical misfit born with its “heart . . . beating on the outside of its chest.” Many more grotesqueries appear, in an atmospheric tale that may have readers gasping for air. Another stunner from a gifted and versatile new master of historical fiction. (First printing of 40,000; Book-of-the- Month/Quality Paperback Book Club selections)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-87113-753-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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