In his autobiographical first novel, this Bulgarian-American writer describes the travails of an alienated musical prodigy in Cold War Bulgaria.
“Youth is feeling seventy years old, misanthropic, and ready to die at fifteen.” So says the narrator, Konstantin. He is indeed 15, an award-winning classical pianist at Sofia Music School for the Gifted. He’s been there (Italy and Germany, for competitions) and done that (up in the school’s attic, with willing female fellow-students). His world-weariness is not just adolescent posturing. It reflects life in 1987 Bulgaria, one of the most repressive of Europe’s communist states. Its leaders, declaims Konstantin, are midgets and puppets, as are most of his teachers. His parents, both academics, are monsters, though there’s no evidence for that; they’re kept offstage. Hanging out with like-minded rebels provides some relief, but the great escape for him is music, especially his beloved Chopin. Grozni’s static novel moves between rhapsodic descriptions of his practice pieces and his sneering denigration of the regime and its obedient servants, his teachers. This is the petulance of the privileged; it becomes wearisome. Real suffering is embodied in his old uncle, who several times faced death in a Bulgarian concentration camp after offending the government. Konstantin knows that his talent is his ticket out, as his sympathetic piano teacher tells him, yet he has a self-destructive streak. He feels closest to Irina, a fine violinist and the school’s most disturbed student. He participates in pranks that are not so funny, scaring the daylights out of some teachers with some Kalashnikovs. In a familiar first novel pattern, the action is crammed into the closing chapters. Grozni’s writing about music is resonant and nuanced; his writing about life under communism, much less so.
Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1691-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
Powerfully affecting and disturbing.
A young man dying of AIDS returns to his Ohio hometown, where people think homosexuality is a sin and the disease is divine punishment.
Brian left Chester when he was 18, seeking freedom to be who he was in New York City. Now, in 1986, he’s 24, his partner and virtually all of their friends are dead, and he’s moving into the disease’s late stages. “He turned his back on his family to live a life of sin and he’s sick because of it,” thinks his mother, Sharon; nonetheless she says yes when Brian asks if he can come home after years of estrangement. His father, Travis, insists they must keep Brian’s illness and sexuality a secret; he makes Sharon set aside tableware and bedclothes exclusively for their son and wash them separately wearing gloves. Sickels (The Evening Hour, 2012) doesn’t gloss over the shame Brian’s family feels nor the astonishing cruelty of their friends and neighbors when word gets out. Brian’s ejection from the local swimming pool is the first in a series of increasingly ugly incidents: vicious phone calls, hate mail to the local newspapers, graffiti on the family garage, a gunshot through the windshield of his father’s car. Grandmother Lettie is Brian’s only open defender, refusing to speak to friends who ostracize him and boycotting the diner that denied him service. Younger sister Jess, taunted at school, wishes he’d never come home and tells him so. This unvarnished portrait of what people are capable of when gripped by ignorance and fear is relieved slightly by a few cracks in the facade of the town’s intolerance, some moments of kindness or at least faint regret as Brian’s health worsens over the summer and fall. Sharon and Travis both eventually acknowledge they have failed their son; she makes some amends while he can only grieve. Sickels’ characters are painfully flawed and wholly, believably human in their failings. This unflinching honesty, conveyed in finely crafted prose, makes for a memorable and unsettling novel.
Powerfully affecting and disturbing.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-938235-62-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Wingate sheds light on a shameful true story of child exploitation but is less successful in engaging readers in her...
Avery Stafford, a lawyer, descendant of two prominent Southern families and daughter of a distinguished senator, discovers a family secret that alters her perspective on heritage.
Wingate (Sisters, 2016, etc.) shifts the story in her latest novel between present and past as Avery uncovers evidence that her Grandma Judy was a victim of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society and is related to a woman Avery and her father meet when he visits a nursing home. Although Avery is living at home to help her parents through her father’s cancer treatment, she is also being groomed for her own political career. Readers learn that investigating her family’s past is not part of Avery's scripted existence, but Wingate's attempts to make her seem torn about this are never fully developed, and descriptions of her chemistry with a man she meets as she's searching are also unconvincing. Sections describing the real-life orphanage director Georgia Tann, who stole poor children, mistreated them, and placed them for adoption with wealthy clients—including Joan Crawford and June Allyson—are more vivid, as are passages about Grandma Judy and her siblings. Wingate’s fans and readers who enjoy family dramas will find enough to entertain them, and book clubs may enjoy dissecting the relationship and historical issues in the book.
Wingate sheds light on a shameful true story of child exploitation but is less successful in engaging readers in her fictional characters' lives.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-425-28468-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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