Misplaced emphases and a somewhat sanctimonious lead weaken an otherwise robust debut.
A coming-of-age story is merged with a Civil War tale in Taylor’s debut novel.
Narrator John Naro, of Lynchburg, Va., turns 16 the day in 1861 that his state secedes from the Union. The town rejoices but his father’s reaction is muted, even though his wool mill benefits from new orders, necessitating the purchase of more slaves. The reality of the war hits home when cousin Sam returns, having lost a leg at Manassas. The following year John’s father allows him to leave for Charlottesville, to become a medical student at the University of Virginia (the author’s alma mater); it’s here that John’s story really starts. The war soon forces him to move from the classroom to the adjacent hospital, where he accompanies his professor, Dr. Cabell, on rounds, gaining priceless hands-on experience; his limited spare time he spends courting Lorrie, Cabell’s beautiful but prickly niece. Taylor wears the past as comfortably as an old shoe, and the credibility of John’s hospital experience is the novel’s greatest strength; however, this tight focus sometimes seems like tunnel vision. It’s not as though life back in Lynchburg lacks for drama. On a visit home, John finds Sam, now running the mill, has freed all the slaves, to the dismay of their picketing neighbors. Yet his family, falling apart as bankruptcy looms, gets less attention from the author than a Christmas dinner Lorrie prepares for the hospital, or her elite social circle. While John labors selflessly in the wards, his rejection of his now invisible family becomes ice-cold and total. He replaces them with a surrogate father, a lieutenant from the North whose life he saved, and Lorrie, who he marries in 1864. The surrender of the university, quietly negotiated by the faculty chairman, counts for less than John’s marital problems. His desperate attempt to end those problems leads to a melodramatic turnaround.
Misplaced emphases and a somewhat sanctimonious lead weaken an otherwise robust debut.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5065-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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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