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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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