by Nomi Eve ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 12, 2014
Eve is a natural storyteller; too bad the paint-by-numbers ending undermines her riveting portrait of the lost culture of...
Eve (The Family Orchard, 2000) re-creates the exotic, unfamiliar world of Yemen’s complex Jewish community from the 1920s through its wholesale exodus to Israel in 1949-50 through one young woman’s eyes.
The Damari family lives in Qaraah, a small Northern Yemen village, where their loving but sickly father owns a leather shop. In 1923, the local enforcer of the Orphans Decree—an actual law that allowed Muslims to forcibly remove and adopt fatherless Jewish children—shows particular interest in 5-year-old Adela Damari. Given her father’s precarious health, Adela grows up under a cloud of fear. The only way to avoid adoption is to become betrothed, a common-enough event for children in her culture. Unfortunately, Adela’s fiances keep dying, one of several bits of semimagical realism in the novel. Finally, thanks to her tough-minded mother’s trickery, Adela finds herself engaged at age 8 to her first cousin Asaf, recently arrived with his spice-merchant father from India. Their childhood romance progresses until Asaf must leave Qaraah with his father. Not yet in puberty, Adela pines for him, but her life changes dramatically in 1930 when another uncle moves to Qaraah with his wife, Rahel, a healer and gifted henna dyer—who knew henna was important in Eastern Jewish culture?—and their daughter, Hani. Despite her tradition-bound mother’s disapproval and distrust, Adela is immediately drawn to her sophisticated, imaginative and warmhearted relatives. Hani, who teaches her to read, becomes Adela’s most trusted friend. Rahel teaches her the art of henna. But happiness shatters in 1933 when drought and illness strike. Adela, now a young woman of 15, flees with Hani’s family to British-controlled Aden. Asaf reappears in their lives the next year. Suddenly the novel switches gears: Leisurely, slightly mystical, bittersweet reminiscence gives way to rushed melodrama as betrayal and sexuality mix under the long shadow of World War II.
Eve is a natural storyteller; too bad the paint-by-numbers ending undermines her riveting portrait of the lost culture of Yemeni Jews.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4027-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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by Nomi Eve
by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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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
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by Susan Crandall ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 2, 2013
Young Starla is an endearing character whose spirited observations propel this nicely crafted story.
Crandall (Sleep No More, 2010, etc.) delivers big with a coming-of-age story set in Mississippi in 1963 and narrated by a precocious 9-year-old.
Due in part to tradition, intimidation and Jim Crow laws, segregation is very much ingrained into the Southern lifestyle in 1963. Few white children question these rules, least of all Starla Caudelle, a spunky young girl who lives with her stern, unbending grandmother in Cayuga Springs, Miss., and spends an inordinate amount of time on restriction for her impulsive actions and sassy mouth. Starla’s dad works on an oil rig in the Gulf; her mother abandoned the family to seek fame and fortune in Nashville when Starla was 3. In her youthful innocence, Starla’s convinced that her mother’s now a big singing star, and she dreams of living with her again one day, a day that seems to be coming more quickly than Starla’s anticipated. Convinced that her latest infraction is about to land her in reform school, Starla decides she has no recourse but to run away from home and head to Nashville to find her mom. Ill prepared for the long, hot walk and with little concept of time and distance, Starla becomes weak and dehydrated as she trudges along the hot, dusty road. She gladly accepts water and a ride from Eula, a black woman driving an old truck, and finds, to her surprise, that she’s not Eula’s only passenger. Inside a basket is a young white baby, an infant supposedly abandoned outside a church, whom Eula calls James. Although Eula doesn’t intend to drive all the way to Nashville, when she shows up at her home with the two white children, a confrontation with her husband forces her into becoming a part of Starla’s journey, and it’s this journey that creates strong bonds between the two: They help each other face fears as they each become stronger individuals. Starla learns firsthand about the abuse and scare tactics used to intimidate blacks and the skewed assumption of many whites that blacks are inferior beings. Assisted by a black schoolteacher who shows Eula and Starla unconditional acceptance and kindness, both ultimately learn that love and kinship transcend blood ties and skin color.
Young Starla is an endearing character whose spirited observations propel this nicely crafted story.Pub Date: July 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-0772-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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