Andre is a friendly kid but hardly a complex one, and newcomer Friedman has to reach and stretch for material enough to fill...
The sometimes, though never deeply, amusing little tale of a teenaged boy planning for his sex life.
Andre Schulman is a New York City kid of 16 (the year is 1957) when he happens upon his parents’ sex manual, hidden at the back of a shelf—upon, that is, Van de Velde’s 1926 Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Techniques. For the enterprising and thoughtful Andre, the discovery becomes an incentive for much careful thinking, especially after he reads that Van de Velde holds as an achievable ideal the “husband as permanent lover of his wife”—an idea prompting Andre to “get a head start” and “begin preparing for marriage early.” He hopes briefly that he might lose his virginity to the unhappy and alcoholic Ronda, miserable with her own awful husband—but Ronda’s seductive overture proves to have been more boozy than real. On the other hand, a job as pillow salesman at Bloomingdale’s—industrious, he learns A to Z about bed pillows—lands him by quick invitation in the bed of an older woman, Gloria, who makes him a man—and whom he impresses with his own oral (albeit book-learned) technique. Gloria is a once-only girl, though, and Andre is left pining quixotically again for his true love, the perfect and pretty Jessica, though she lives in Boston and has taken up again with her previous boyfriend. The story maunders as high-school graduation draws slowly nearer and Andre dreams of the day Jessica will be his again—if ever. His father (a veterinarian who doesn’t like cats) offers a helpful conversation about masturbation (harmful only in excess, says dad), and Andre even finds out, in talking with his mother, that his father has brought less to an ideal marriage than he might have.
Andre is a friendly kid but hardly a complex one, and newcomer Friedman has to reach and stretch for material enough to fill up even this microcosmic little slip of a Bildungsroman.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-57962-100-7
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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
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
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