A fine work of literary fiction that’s reminiscent of earlier Southern modernist texts.
Brame’s posthumously published novel of the South offers an evaluation of life in North Carolina during the Great Depression.
The story opens from the vantage point of young Sarah Lynn, a girl about to turn 16, and quickly draws readers into the American South during one of its most repressive yet culturally rich eras. In 1935, Sarah Lynn is eager to grow up, and she falls for a man who her mother believes is too low-class; as a result, the girl is sent to live with her Uncle Orphey. The work contains echoes of Faulkner-ian themes as it frankly and directly addresses issues of class and race in a richly rendered environment. Fortunately for casual readers, Brame’s prose is crisp and clean, and he presents his characters in a straightforward, compelling manner, in a style similar to some of the 1920s-era poets known as the Fugitives, such as Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate. As the novel’s coming-of-age story emerges, it reveals the South’s darker side of economic hardship and racism. However, it also shows the South as a culturally vibrant region, both socially and ethnically, and as readers encounter familiar-feeling characters—the rich, immoral members of the upper class, a priestess who engages with the supernatural—none of them ever feel like stock types. As the story nears its core conflict of old-guard segregationists versus the good, faithful people of Union County, readers will find themselves engaged by the complex but never intimidating plot. Still, the novel is not without its faults, such as occasionally slow pacing and dated-sounding phrases (“Oh how she missed the humor that had kept them laughing”). That said, readers familiar with the South will recognize Brame’s clear, realistic picture of the region, warts and all.
A fine work of literary fiction that’s reminiscent of earlier Southern modernist texts.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494349578
Page Count: 278
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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