Happy families, alike or not, do not electrifying fiction make.
Southern girls gone mild figure in Brown’s nostalgic paean to a town bifurcated by the Mason-Dixon Line.
A prefatory author’s note issues a disclaimer: “This is not a plot-driven book.” But what readers, particularly of Brown’s various mystery series, may not be expecting is that the book is also not driven by suspense or conflict. Instead, it portrays more or less happy people leading uneventful and in some cases exceedingly prosperous lives in 1920. Celeste, the protagonist, is a wealthy heiress, gorgeous, bisexual, and vaguely uncomfortable with her enforced leisure since her father left the stewardship of the family industries to her brothers. With her only partially mixed blessing, her brother Curtis has just married her longtime lover, Ramelle, who is pregnant with his child. The story, such as it is, revolves around a half-year in the lives of Celeste, her friends, and retainers in the town of Runnymede, situated on the Pennsylvania/Maryland border. Celeste falls in love with Ben, a baseball player who's a World War I veteran and an aspiring stained-glass artist. She sets about making his life better without overtly appearing to be his benefactor and wounding his male pride. Her housekeeper and cook, Cora, has two daughters, Louise and Julia, who provide the closest thing to entertainment this novel offers with their crushes and teenage rivalries, including a long-standing spat with a classmate, Dimps Jr., whose main offense seems to be large breasts. Celeste comes to the aid of her older sister, Carlotta, who runs a Catholic school, when a fire breaks out, threatening to expose a major source of the school’s and Carlotta’s income: a cellarful of bootleg liquor. (Prohibition has just descended on Runnymede’s recalcitrant citizens.) Apparently both a prequel to and recap of her other Runnymede novels (e.g. Loose Lips, 1999, Six of One, 1978, etc.), this outing serves up unremitting dollops of niceness.
Happy families, alike or not, do not electrifying fiction make.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 9780553392654
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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