ISRA ISLE

Name: ISRA ISLE
Author: Nava Semel
ISBN: 9781942134190

by Nava Semel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 25, 2016

Semel’s imagined history might have been more convincing if her smaller details had held together: her characters, for one,...

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What if the world’s Jews had resettled in North America instead of in the Middle East?

Simon T. Lenox is an American police investigator reluctantly pursuing Liam Emanuel, a man gone missing. Emanuel, an Israeli, arrived only recently in the United States. He arrived and then disappeared. Lenox traces him to Niagara Falls, where it seems Emanuel has an inheritance waiting for him. It turns out that in 1825, an American Jew purchased an island, downriver from the falls, intending it to be a homeland for Jews from all over the world. Semel (And the Rat Laughed, 2008, etc.) has rooted her most recent work of fiction in what is apparently historical fact. A man named Mordecai Noah really bought Grand Island with the grand intentions that, as we know, came to nothing. The first portion of Semel’s novel, set in September 2001, concerns Lenox’s search for Emanuel, a descendant of Noah’s. The second part goes backward in time to see Noah buy the land in question from the Native Americans currently settled there. The last part imagines an alternate world in which Grand Island became a real refuge for Jews. It is called “Isra Isle,” and it has effectively replaced a certain nation with a similar-sounding name. This is an odd—a deeply odd—piece of fiction, and it is even odder in Semel’s telling. That’s partly because she packs in so much that is tangential to the story: 9/11, for one, but also the fact that Lenox, the investigator, is of Native American descent—and not only that, he experiences visions. It’s hard not to see this as cultural stereotyping, especially since Lenox, like Semel’s other characters, is otherwise as flat as a piece of cardboard.

Semel’s imagined history might have been more convincing if her smaller details had held together: her characters, for one, and their motivations, manners of speaking, and so on—but they don’t.

Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016

ISBN: 9781942134190

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Mandel Vilar Press

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016

Categories:

RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

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Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS

by C.S. Lewis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1942

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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.