An intelligently executed tale, historically scrupulous and dramatically captivating.
In this novel, a Jewish man whose family was driven from his Polish village by Nazis recounts his story to a historian in Tel Aviv who struggles to save her ailing marriage.
In 1939, when Itzhak “Ichu” Ozer is on the cusp of turning 7 years old, his family flees Tarnobrzeg, a small Polish village, when it is invaded by Nazis. The Ozers are deported to Russia and make their way to Lvov, a “ruin of rubble” from the war. Later, they are sent to a primitive work camp in Siberia. They are not free—they are “prisoners of the communist regime”—but they are blessedly alive, though they are made to suffer through the grim challenges of a brutally cold winter and a chronic scarcity of food. While in the Siberian labor camp, Itzhak is separated from Tzipke, the first love of his life and the girl to whom he promises himself in marriage. Eighty years later, Itzhak decides to tell his extraordinary story of childhood survival, one powerfully related by Shiri-Horowitz, and enlists the help of Maya Levin, a historian. She’s gripped by his experiences and draws strength from them as she wrestles with a marriage that has grown cold and full of distance and threatens to die. This moving historical novel flirts with sentimentality—an account of the possible reunion of Itzhak and Tzipke is gushingly romantic. Still, the author presents a story of the Ozers’ plight that is both historically exacting and literarily engaging. At one point, Maya asserts: “Every person has his own journey, each one challenging in its own right, but the journey undergone by Itzhak’s family taught me every day anew the meaning of fortitude and perseverance, and of the human need to care for our loved ones and those around us. And to live, simply to live.” This is a work that will be of special interest to those with a desire to know more about the plight of Jews in Poland during World War II and the hostility encountered by those who survived and returned.
An intelligently executed tale, historically scrupulous and dramatically captivating.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2021
ISBN: 979-8985179200
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Horowitz Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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