Once it finds its stride, this novel achieves a breathless finish.
A flapper marries into Chicago’s North Side mob shortly before that gang challenges Al Capone’s South Siders for control of Chicago’s rackets.
Vera Abramowitz, young, Jewish and determined to escape her mother, moves into a boardinghouse and gets a job as a typist, as does her friend Evelyn. Although Evelyn’s origins are solidly middle class, Vera had a brush with Chicago-style crime early on: Her mother took over Abramowitz’s kosher meatpacking plant in the Stock Yards after her father was killed by the notorious Black Hand mob. The friends bob their hair, frequent speak-easies and soon attract gangster boyfriends. For a while, Vera is dangerously seeing both handsome gambler Tony, a Capone henchman, and affable, refined Shep Green, a nightclub owner and kingpin of the North Side gang. When Vera becomes pregnant, Tony absconds, and so she persuades Shep to marry her. Shep’s associate Izzy slaps Evelyn around, and when Vera confronts him, he insinuates that he knows about Tony. Aside from the occasional bullet hole in the ceiling of her opulent new home and foulmouthed gangsters interrupting her Women’s Jewish Council meetings, Vera settles comfortably into marriage to the mob, Roaring ’20s–style. Her support system now includes, besides Evelyn, Basha and Dora, two self-professed gun molls who show the greenhorns the ropes. When Vera witnesses the torture of an underling by Shep and his boss, Dion, she almost leaves, but the birth of daughter Hannah and her luxurious surroundings paralyze her resolve. After Dion is bumped off by Capone’s men, hostilities between the two mobs escalate rapidly. The novel gets off to a slow start as Vera hovers on the fringes of Shep’s world; it isn’t until a third of the way in, as Vera’s dilemma deepens, that narrative tension heightens. Clearly, Rosen, a Chicagoan, has done her research to bring this world to life, but the period ambience is disrupted at times by anachronisms like “rethink” and “updated.”
Once it finds its stride, this novel achieves a breathless finish.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-451-41920-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: New American Library
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Wingate sheds light on a shameful true story of child exploitation but is less successful in engaging readers in her...
Avery Stafford, a lawyer, descendant of two prominent Southern families and daughter of a distinguished senator, discovers a family secret that alters her perspective on heritage.
Wingate (Sisters, 2016, etc.) shifts the story in her latest novel between present and past as Avery uncovers evidence that her Grandma Judy was a victim of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society and is related to a woman Avery and her father meet when he visits a nursing home. Although Avery is living at home to help her parents through her father’s cancer treatment, she is also being groomed for her own political career. Readers learn that investigating her family’s past is not part of Avery's scripted existence, but Wingate's attempts to make her seem torn about this are never fully developed, and descriptions of her chemistry with a man she meets as she's searching are also unconvincing. Sections describing the real-life orphanage director Georgia Tann, who stole poor children, mistreated them, and placed them for adoption with wealthy clients—including Joan Crawford and June Allyson—are more vivid, as are passages about Grandma Judy and her siblings. Wingate’s fans and readers who enjoy family dramas will find enough to entertain them, and book clubs may enjoy dissecting the relationship and historical issues in the book.
Wingate sheds light on a shameful true story of child exploitation but is less successful in engaging readers in her fictional characters' lives.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-425-28468-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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