While sometimes offering a confusing tangle of voices that lack individual features, this tale delivers a fresh and...
A young John the Apostle leaves his home to follow Jesus in this debut biblical novel.
In Bruno’s tale, John, teenage son of Zebedee, has almost wrecked his father’s fishing boat in a foolhardy night voyage with his friends Andrew and Philip. He travels with Andrew from Galilee to Jerusalem to offer doves as a sacrifice for having offended his family. They meet a very young (and fictional) Hezekiah, who helps sell Andrew’s donkey, then tells them of a new prophet who is preaching and baptizing at the Jordan River. Andrew and John travel with friend Nathanael (of Cana) to hear this prophet and are baptized by John the Baptist, who gives John a commentary scroll on Isaiah to study. After encountering new devotees and assisting with the baptisms, John meets Jesus. Seeing his healing powers, John agrees to serve as his lowest servant, to the consternation of the teen’s socially conscious mother. But the position affords John a day-to-day working relationship with the teacher, and Jesus promises him the scroll of Joshua to study. Bruno separates his chapters with exact dates and times (“Thursday 6 March AD 27, 8:00 AM”), meant only to be illustrative. He also gives greater voices to women—Jesus’ mother, Mary, and Concordia, Simon Peter’s wife—than they have in Scripture. Endnotes illuminate prophesies and historical details. The author deftly exposes the bureaucratic, face-saving hypocrisy of Herod, the temple priests, and the Pharisees and Sadducees, which gives proper context for Jesus speaking to the Samaritan woman and his expulsion of the moneychangers. Other scenes, such as Jesus’ baptism and John the Baptist’s arrest, are not dramatized, and the wedding in Cana water-into-wine miracle is anticlimactic. With so many characters, the dialogue seems disembodied at times. And a map with dates would have enhanced Bruno’s timeline. Still, this clever and ambitious reboot of the Gospels succeeds in humanizing these historical figures, and the author’s skillful use of modern slang flows naturally.
While sometimes offering a confusing tangle of voices that lack individual features, this tale delivers a fresh and well-researched fictionalization of the assembling of the Apostles from John’s point of view.Pub Date: June 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4908-8332-8
Page Count: 162
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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