An entertaining but clumsily executed revenge tale.
A ruthless nemesis stalks two lovers in this novel set in 19th-century Germany.
Frau Sandenberg is a strict and unforgiving mistress. The wife of a wealthy landowner who oversees the village of Gluckmutter in Holstein, she firmly believes in the separation of the working and noble classes, and accordingly treats her servants as if they’re less than human. One of those servants, a young washerwoman named Gretchen Haager, internally rebels against this treatment. Gretchen dearly misses her large, boisterous family, and only went into service to save it the cost of feeding yet another mouth. But when she receives a letter with the news that her mother is dying, and Frau Sandenberg (whom she thinks of as “the Villafrau”) refuses to let her visit her family, Gretchen finally decides to defy her mistress and abandon her post. In the same village, a young man named Georg Schillingberg has just returned home after deserting his position in the Prussian army. Georg simply doesn’t believe in Prussia’s dreams of European military domination, and war strays even further from his mind when he happens on Gretchen in a moment of anguish and falls in love with her at first sight. But the watchful eyes of Frau Sandenberg witness the lovers’ meeting—a stroke of bad luck that seals their fate. For no matter where they go or how they disguise themselves, Gretchen and Georg inevitably (and often improbably) become targets of the Villafrau’s wrath. In this series opener, Florence (Out of the Shadow, 2018, etc.) effectively maintains the story’s drama, constantly placing new obstacles in the protagonists’ paths and setting the entire saga against an intriguing backdrop of vast national changes. But the actual telling of the tale significantly hinders its promising structure. The omniscient narrator can’t seem to make up its mind what tone or time period to portray, marrying formal language like “Gretchen attended to her morning ablutions” with such colloquial, anachronistic phrases as “I was doing my thing” and “I’m glad we sorted that out.” And because the dialogue features characters bluntly stating the book’s themes, the complexity of their thoughts and motivations is lost.
An entertaining but clumsily executed revenge tale.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5043-1002-4
Page Count: 259
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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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