A fine tribute to a one-in-a-million character despite a few hard-to-swallow plot devices.
After becoming engaged to a Marine just before he ships off to the Middle East, Annie travels with her mother to England, where a mysterious crumbling estate and an aging aristocrat change her life.
Annie meets Eric in a bar and finds herself engaged to him within a month. He’s preparing to deploy, and she’s packing for a trip to Banbury, England, with her mother, Laurel, who has some oddly secretive business to take care of. Days pass while Laurel is locked in complicated negotiations, so Annie hangs out in a pub, reading a biography of the vibrantly eccentric Duchess of Marlborough—a real person worth a Google search—who had lived in Banbury. Annie and the book catch the attention of Gus, an older gentleman who frequents the pub and knew the Duchess (aka Gladys) years ago, when she lived in the village as a recluse. Gus shares stories of the duchess’s last years, and here the author blends fact with a story built around two fictional characters, the biographer and the duchess’s paid companion, both of whom helped her outwit family members who were trying to get their hands on her fortune. After Annie realizes the home where the Duchess lived is the same property her mother is trying to sell, some investigation reveals she has a more personal stake in the story than she imagined. Gable (A Paris Apartment, 2014) tells an engaging story of a fascinating, largely forgotten historical figure against the backdrop of two fledgling romances, those of Annie and her fiance, who grow closer through emails, and the biographer and the companion, whose romantic adventures went awry but may still be salvaged decades later. Blending fact and fiction in an entertaining but occasionally confusing way, the author offers a fascinating version of the reclusive years of the larger-than-life duchess. Many aspects of her life are hard to believe, yet it’s the fictional story that sometimes stretches the threshold of credibility. Characters try too hard to maintain big secrets that, once revealed, seem unworthy of such effort, especially given how easily some of the big conflicts could be eliminated with simple conversations.
A fine tribute to a one-in-a-million character despite a few hard-to-swallow plot devices.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07063-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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