by Paula Cohen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2002
As melodramatic and stagy as any opera, but without the compensations of music and singers.
Cohen’s debut takes a popular Victorian theme—destitute young woman rescued by older man with rakish past—and tweaks it for current preoccupations, adding pedophilia and anti-Semitism to a story that’s more sensational melodrama than romance.
Set in the early 1890s, the tale has trademark Wharton details—Mrs. Astor is still giving parties; money as much as love is the stuff of gossip, and reputations can be destroyed by the smallest indiscretion—but, like the décor in present-day theme restaurants, these seem contrived and artificial. All begins as Mario Alfieri, a famous Italian tenor, arrives to make his debut at the Metropolitan Opera. In his 40s and unmarried, Mario is a noted womanizer. Wanting some privacy, he decides to rent a house and is shown one facing Gramercy Park. The property of the recently deceased Henry Slade, it’s just what he wants—but then, exploring, he encounters, hidden in the music room, a sickly looking girl. Sensing her underlying beauty, Mario is instantly smitten. The girl is 20-year old Clara Adler, the mysterious Jewish ward of the late Mr. Slade and thought to be his heir until his will revealed otherwise. Naturally, Mario, who decides he wants to marry Clara, has to contend with a wicked and wily adversary: Slade’s lawyer, the sinister Thaddeus Chadwick, with his own dastardly plans for Clara. Though Mario whisks Clara away from the house and marries her, he discovers that she has a troubled past—which, soon revealed, makes the rest of the tale an anticlimactic race to bring Chadwick to justice. Clara, Mario learns, was seduced at age 11 by a pedophiliac headmaster; she is also haunted by dreams of murder and mayhem, which the loving Mario must confront, ditto for threats to his reputation and career.
As melodramatic and stagy as any opera, but without the compensations of music and singers.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-27552-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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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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