A workplace drama that often feels too much like work.
A revered skin care doyenne battles a private equity turnaround team in Vincenzi’s latest (More Than You Know, 2012, etc.).
Athina Farrell founded the House of Farrell cosmetics firm with her handsome husband, Cornelius, in 1953, the year of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. Now, as the queen’s diamond jubilee approaches, the venture capitalists who have taken over Farrell’s have installed Bianca, a high-powered turnaround artist, as CEO, charged with the Sisyphean task of revitalizing the near-bankrupt firm. Athina, now 85 and widowed, had no choice but to allow the buyout, but having negotiated 51 percent of the stock for herself and her two children, Bertram and Caroline, she hopes the family can retain control of the company. Since her superannuated lawyers didn’t build voting rights into the mix, this may be more of a challenge than Athina anticipated, but she has an ace up her well-tailored sleeve: a recipe for a blockbuster perfume. As is typical with Vincenzi’s novels, this premise brings together myriad characters (the Character List at the beginning is indispensable) and subplots. Bianca, who has depended on her staid banker husband, Patrick, to do the heavy domestic lifting as she toils 24/7, has her world upended when he enters the all-consuming field of hedge fund analysis. With both parents thus preoccupied, preteen daughter Milly endures vicious bullying at private school; her anguish is noticed but not addressed. Florence, a longtime Farrell’s retainer who manages a tiny but opulent store frequented by London’s glitterati, has a secret: she and Cornelius carried on an affair for years. Why did Athina withhold her perfume formula for decades? All part of the matriarch’s plan to sabotage the CEO, Bianca thinks. After about 400 pages, the multiple plotlines begin to pay off. While many readers may find this fictionalized case history of a company in crisis absorbing, others, particularly those seeking an escape from long-winded meetings and office politics, may not.
A workplace drama that often feels too much like work.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1091-7
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Whitehead continues the African-American artists' inquiry into race mythology and history with rousing audacity and...
What if the metaphorical Underground Railroad had been an actual…underground railroad, complete with steam locomotive pulling a “dilapidated box car” along a subterranean nexus of steel tracks?
For roughly its first 60 pages, this novel behaves like a prelude to a slave narrative which is, at once, more jolting and sepulchral than the classic firsthand accounts of William Wells Brown and Solomon Northup. Its protagonist, Cora, is among several African-American men and women enslaved on a Georgia plantation and facing a spectrum of savage indignities to their bodies and souls. A way out materializes in the form of an educated slave named Caesar, who tells her about an underground railroad that can deliver her and others northward to freedom. So far, so familiar. But Whitehead, whose eclectic body of work encompasses novels (Zone One, 2011, etc.) playing fast and loose with “real life,” both past and present, fires his most daring change-up yet by giving the underground railroad physical form. This train conveys Cora, Caesar, and other escapees first to a South Carolina also historically unrecognizable with its skyscrapers and its seemingly, if microscopically, more liberal attitude toward black people. Compared with Georgia, though, the place seems so much easier that Cora and Caesar are tempted to remain, until more sinister plans for the ex-slaves’ destiny reveal themselves. So it’s back on the train and on to several more stops: in North Carolina, where they’ve not only abolished slavery, but are intent on abolishing black people, too; through a barren, more forbidding Tennessee; on to a (seemingly) more hospitable Indiana, and restlessly onward. With each stop, a slave catcher named Ridgeway, dispensing long-winded rationales for his wicked calling, doggedly pursues Cora and her diminishing company of refugees. And with every change of venue, Cora discovers anew that “freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, the empty meadow, you see its true limits.” Imagine a runaway slave novel written with Joseph Heller’s deadpan voice leasing both Frederick Douglass’ grim realities and H.P. Lovecraft’s rococo fantasies…and that’s when you begin to understand how startlingly original this book is.
Whitehead continues the African-American artists' inquiry into race mythology and history with rousing audacity and razor-sharp ingenuity; he is now assuredly a writer of the first rank.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-53703-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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