Ambitious and surprising.
In a mix of historical fiction and fantasy, Rossner's debut weaves a richly detailed story of Jewish identity and sisterhood.
Sisters Laya and Liba are different as night and day. In their family’s cottage, nestled in the Kodari forest surrounding the town of Dubossary, they adhere in different degrees to their family’s Orthodox Judaism. Dark-haired Liba—ungainly and dogged by a persistent hunger for meat—revels in Jewish study with her father, while Laya, who possesses the preternatural ability to communicate with the Kodari forest itself, is a free spirit animated by wanderlust, eager to break with the strictures of their insular community. Though held at arm’s length by the local Jews because their mother is a convert, the sisters live a relatively peaceful life till an unexpected visit from their father’s brother Yankl brings news of their grandfather’s illness in a nearby town. Yankl implores their father to return, and before their parents embark on the journey, Liba witnesses them transform into animals—her father into a bear, her mother into a swan—forcing them to expose a long-hidden truth. Each girl is descended from a lineage able to morph, at will, into an animal counterpart: Liba into a bear like her father, Laya into a swan like her mother. Just as the girls begin to come to grips with this new reality, their parents leave and a sense of foreboding infects Dubossary. Jews are blamed for the deaths of two gentiles whose bodies were found at the edge of an orchard; a mysterious band of brothers peddling fruit occupies the town market; and families disappear. As the sisters grapple with the frightening implications of their identities, they must harness them to shield the town from forces that threaten to tear it apart. Told in alternating sections from the two sisters' perspectives that switch between prose (for Liba) and occasionally melodramatic poetry (for Laya), this is an atmospheric yarn that sets elements of Jewish, Greek, and European folklore against a pogrom-era Eastern European backdrop. Rossner’s story is inspired by her own family's history; each of her great-grandparents fled anti-Semitic violence in Europe, and her story is emotionally charged, full of sharp historical detail and well-deployed Yiddish phrases. Though the narrative is dragged down by stilted dialogue and a clichéd romance for Liba, the sensitive depiction of the sisters' bond and surprising mythological elements will keep readers’ interest piqued.
Ambitious and surprising.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-48325-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Redhook/Orbit
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
PROFILES
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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