The first installment of Guest’s series breathes life into a compelling, relatable character that readers will gladly follow...
Russian best-selling author Guest introduces English readers to Vicka Zotova, a young Soviet girl who falls in love with a KGB officer.
Vicka is in love with her KGB fiancé Sergei Nilovski, with whom she shares an idyllic romance. But when a life-changing decision upends all that she knows and leads her into a world of espionage and intrigue, Vicka ends up kidnapped by a mysterious, rich and powerful man who falls in love with her. Waking to find she’s been snatched away from the life she’s known and the man she loves, Vicka sets out to do all that she can to escape. It turns out, however, that she doesn’t have to do much; her escape, detailed by the author in fast-paced and engaging prose, seems too easy and readers yearning for a more robust and suspenseful plot will be disappointed. The author combines aspects of romance, action/adventure and tragedy to create a layered and emotional story. But some aspects of the novel defy credibility, such as Vicka’s aforementioned escape, which may throw some readers out of the narrative. Guest’s language is fluid and effective, though at times it is apparent something may have been lost in translation. By the novel’s conclusion, readers have witnessed the transformation of this young Soviet girl into a woman of her own making. Vicka may not end up with the life she’s always dreamed of, but she values what she has instead. The author excels at character development, and she clearly understands what makes people tick, grow and change.
The first installment of Guest’s series breathes life into a compelling, relatable character that readers will gladly follow into subsequent volumes.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-1468077353
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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