From acclaimed Polish writer Huelle (Who Is David Weiser?, 1992), poignantly beautiful stories that limn memories and loss with a subtly nuanced critique of totalitarianism. Set mostly in Gdansk, these seven tales observe the lingering consequences of past events on a country and a family. In ``The Table,'' a boy records the growing tensions between his parents provoked by a table given to his father by a German refugee returning home at the end of WW II: His mother cannot forgive the Germans, and his father cannot forgive the Russians. A new table made under almost miraculous circumstances—Huelle often relies on a quiet, less ebullient, European kind of magic realism—restores family peace as well as revealing a world richer than the drab present. The two most notable stories, explorations of faith and the mystery of life, are ``Snails, Puddles, Rain'' and ``Uncle Henryk,'' both narrated by an imaginative youngster. In the first, while helping his unemployed engineer-father, he witnesses snails climbing a rock ``to catch the voices of the dead'' and begins to let go of his obsession with death and decay. The second shows the narrator, now older, getting lost while skiing with an uncle who has a tragic past and finding shelter in a village that doesn't exist. The title story evokes the past as a youth whose family is about to move meets an old woman who plays Wagner for him; she annoys his mother, but for the narrator ``it was all strange and entrancing and beautiful, like the park in the old photograph.'' In the most overtly political story, ``In Dublin's Fair City,'' a young man mourns his dead grandfather, who had secretly built a submarine in which he hoped to escape to the West. Quiet but powerful journeys of the spirit.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-15-162731-2
Page Count: 244
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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