A mesmerizing tale of love in a time of extraordinary trials.
In this historical novel, an unlikely Jewish couple—she’s an obsessed bibliophile and he can’t read—struggles under an increasingly antisemitic Russia in the late 19th century.
Esther Leving is a remarkable young woman—a voracious reader, she can write in six languages by the age of 15. She’s also defiantly independent and opinionated. Esther angrily chafes at the “subordination of women and persecution of non-believers” as well as the oppression experienced by Jews, a phenomenon she’s familiar with living in Horodno in the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire. For all her intellectual liveliness, Esther is essentially friendless, hampered by an injured foot, and completely disinterested in the “array of suitors” her parents send her way. She pines to be a writer and expresses disdain for the restrictions of marriage. But when she meets Bernard Garfinkle, the son of a vodka distiller, she falls in love, even after she learns his peculiar secret—despite a nimble mind, he never learned to read, a failing that makes for an odd pairing astutely captured by Freed-Thall: “I love a boy who can’t read. If I hadn’t gotten to know him first, he’d be a book returned to the shelves unopened. Single words aren’t the problem, but when they gather, all talking at once, he lurches forward, pauses, sounds out, only to lose his way and backtrack.” Esther agrees to teach Bernard to read and opens a bookshop he builds for her. But with the ascension of Alexander III comes virulent, violent anti-Jewish sentiment, a historical development rigorously researched and dramatically conveyed by the author. Nevertheless, this novel is at its core a love story—Freed-Thall sensitively limns the ways in which the couple’s devotion transcends their deep differences, not just literary, but also religious. Bernard is devoutly spiritual, and Esther tends to see religious belief as an instrument of thoughtless prejudice. This is a captivating book, historically authentic and movingly romantic.
A mesmerizing tale of love in a time of extraordinary trials.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-57869-067-1
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Rootstock Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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