by Ronald H. Balson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 6, 2016
Balson’s dialogue is stilted and his prose is workmanlike, but the survivor’s tale is the main attraction and does not...
The third in Balson’s promising series about a husband-and-wife investigation team specializing in Holocaust cases.
Hard-bitten Chicago private eye Liam Taggart and his attorney wife, Catherine Lockhart, met while solving a Holocaust-related mystery in the first installment, Once We Were Brothers (2013). Now, as the pair is anticipating the imminent birth of their firstborn, they are contacted by Lena Woodward. A wealthy widow in her 80s, Lena hopes to locate the twin daughters of her friend Karolina, who perished during the Holocaust. Lena relates her story to Catherine incrementally throughout the book. Her survivor account becomes the main source of suspense, since she is reluctant to reveal the full horror of what she experienced until the end. Meanwhile, her son, Arthur, is suing for control of her affairs, claiming that Lena suffers from dementia. The basis for his petition for guardianship is his mother’s sudden obsession with an impossibly quixotic quest. At least that is the ostensible reason—Arthur’s real motivation, Catherine suspects, is that he fears his mother will dissipate his inheritance on a wild goose chase. We learn that Lena was orphaned after the Nazis occupied her small Polish town, Chrzanow, that she was assigned to work with Karolina in a coat factory in the ghetto, and that Karolina’s German lover kept the two girls supplied with enough food to survive. Ultimately, the ghetto is liquidated and the two girls are sent, again through the intervention of a sympathetic German, to Gross-Rosen, a less lethal—comparatively speaking—concentration camp. On the train, Karolina is warned that the Nazis will kill her infants upon arrival at the camp. The desperate measure the friends take to save the twins may have caused their deaths and has haunted Lena her entire life. Scenes involving a cantankerous probate judge demonstrate that Balson, a practicing Chicago attorney, knows his way around a courtroom.
Balson’s dialogue is stilted and his prose is workmanlike, but the survivor’s tale is the main attraction and does not disappoint.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-09837-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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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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by Esi Edugyan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 2018
A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.
High adventure fraught with cliffhanger twists marks this runaway-slave narrative, which leaps, sails, and soars from Caribbean cane fields to the fringes of the frozen Arctic and across a whole ocean.
It's 1830 on the island of Barbados, and a 12-year-old slave named George Washington Black wakes up every hot morning to cruelties administered to him and other black men, women, and children toiling on a sugar plantation owned by the coldblooded Erasmus Wilde. Christopher, one of Erasmus’ brothers, is a flamboyant oddball with insatiable curiosity toward scientific matters and enlightened views on social progress. Upon first encountering young Wash, Christopher, also known as Titch, insists on acquiring him from his brother as his personal valet and research assistant. Neither Erasmus nor Wash is pleased by this transaction, and one of the Wildes' cousins, the dour, mysterious Philip, is baffled by it. But then Philip kills himself in Wash’s presence, and Christopher, knowing the boy will be unjustly blamed and executed for the death, activates his hot air balloon, the Cloud-cutter, to carry both himself and Wash northward into a turbulent storm. So begins one of the most unconventional escapes from slavery ever chronicled as Wash and Titch lose their balloon but are carried the rest of the way to America by a ship co-captained by German-born twins of wildly differing temperaments. Once in Norfolk, Virginia, they meet with a sexton with a scientific interest in dead tissue and a moral interest in ferrying other runaway slaves through the Underground Railroad. Rather than join them on their journey, Wash continues to travel with Titch for a reunion with the Wildes' father, an Arctic explorer, north of Canada. Their odyssey takes even more unexpected turns, and soon Wash finds himself alone and adrift in the unfamiliar world as “a disfigured black boy with a scientific turn of mind…running, always running from the dimmest of shadows.” Canadian novelist Edugyan (Half-Blood Blues, 2012, etc.) displays as much ingenuity and resourcefulness as her main characters in spinning this yarn, and the reader’s expectations are upended almost as often as her hero’s.
A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52142-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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