A suspenseful, convincing account of the hardships that Jews and refugees faced in a terrible war.
Curtis’ debut novel tells of a family’s flight through Europe, moments ahead of the Nazi war machine.
This story is semiautobiographical—or at least one of the characters is. Curtis’ alter ego, the infant Pavel Kohut, is safely born to a successful family of clothiers and the “bourgeois life of servants, fashions, and Prague’s social whirl” but soon finds himself in peril. His father, Willy, an importer of British textiles and an unapologetic Anglophile, is arrested by the Gestapo on suspicion of espionage. It’s 1939, and the Nazis have marched into Czechoslovakia unopposed. Friends become collaborators, Willy’s shop is appropriated, and Willy is beaten in prison until he appears to himself “a humiliated, disgusting wreck.” Sophie, Pavel’s mother, must prostrate herself before one sinister bureaucracy after another to try to learn her husband’s whereabouts, even enduring blackmail and rape (“the emotional damage of giving herself to this swine would haunt her forever”). When she does eventually track Willy down in Pankrác Prison, shut in with a corpse, she and her husband face the joint task of evading the Nazis and ferrying their young son to safety somewhere in the unoccupied West. Their flight brings them new identities, treacherous comrades, and further degradation. Curtis could have made his book a by-the-numbers thriller, but it’s too unblinkingly realistic to work as a potboiler. This is a serious novel about the most serious things in life; as Willy and Sophie travel farther from their home, increasingly stripped of their possessions, their senses of self at sea, they must continually re-evaluate who they are and what matters in their lives. Curtis is exceptionally good at depicting the strain and fractures of a marriage under constant violation from the outside, and both Willy and Sophie evolve and change convincingly through the book. This is a book to be read in sobriety and one that will leave its readers more sober still.
A suspenseful, convincing account of the hardships that Jews and refugees faced in a terrible war.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-944540-14-2
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Sordelet Ink
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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