A pellucid memoir of letting go and coming to terms.
A child prodigy suffers a great loss and then finds herself.
This memoir tells a number of different stories, all of them involving what the virtuosic violinist calls “two Mins.” The first is that of a South Korea–born girl living in England learning that children should be subservient to elders and that girls are inferior. Then there is the prodigy Min, who came to realize just how isolated she had become from ordinary life. Ultimately, there was Min with the violin and Min without, and she developed into a woman who has a life independent of her instrument, one who has found some measure of peace and fulfillment on her own as well as a mature perspective on what she has been through: “I was a little Korean girl thrown into a strange world. I was asked to perform without quite knowing who I was. It’s still a strange world, and I am still Korean, but I don’t bow any more. I know who I am.” In the early chapters, the writing about a child’s passion for music, how it differs for a prodigy, and how it feels to be part of two cultures and somehow apart from each has a purity and stylistic simplicity that are themselves musical, as if Kym has been able to transfer her great potential from her violin to her writing. Yet the story at the heart of this memoir has a complexity with which the author still wrestles. Kym resents that she accedes to the insistence of others, to mentors and to men in general, and her failure to follow her better instincts resulted in the theft of her extremely valuable 1696 Stradivarius violin. She might have eventually gotten it back if, again, she hadn’t listened to others in making wrong decisions. The story of losing, regaining, and losing the violin again keeps the author torn between accepting responsibility and resenting others. “I had devils in my ear,” she writes.
A pellucid memoir of letting go and coming to terms.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-451-49607-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
