An exciting, distressing, and ultimately inspiring novel of hardship and family.
Lowenstein-Malz, in this middle-grade novel, tells the story of an Israeli girl discovering the history of her grandmother’s family.
Growing up in modern Israel, it never occurred to 12-year-old Nessya that her relatives had survived the Holocaust; it wasn’t something that was ever discussed. When she hears a rumor from a friend that her own grandmother, Miri Eneman Malz, is a survivor of that era, Nessya first attempts to covertly investigate her grandparent’s apartment, searching for letters or documents that might explain her past. When her unsubtle plan is discovered, Miri avoids Nessya for two whole weeks. But when Miri finally comes to visit, she brings the very documents that Nessya sought. The letters and diary entries detail Miri and her family’s many harrowing escapes as they fled Nazi-occupied Hungary during the Holocaust. As Nessya reads over the documents, she learns about the heartbreaking fate of Miri’s Jewish neighbors, who couldn’t foresee the coming doom; about the kindness of a few helpful gentiles; and about her grandmother’s parents and sisters, whose courage and ingenuity delivered them from genocide. The experience gives Nessya new insight into her own history and a glimpse into the pain and fortitude of her indefatigable grandma. Deftly translated from the Hebrew by Frankel and accompanied by lovely portrait illustrations by McGaw, Lowenstein-Malz’s prose is simple and elegant, bearing readers smoothly through the story’s multiple narrative layers. Befitting the book’s young audience, the author doesn’t concentrate on the subject matter’s more gruesome aspects, although she doesn’t whitewash the crimes and degradations, either; instead, she focuses on the luck and triumphs of the Eneman family and their cloak-and-dagger journey out of occupied Europe. She imbues her characters with great humanity, and many sections are heart-rending; one, in which a butcher named Yankel receives a postcard from his brother in the Bergen-Belsen camp, may bring tears to readers’ eyes. Such tragedy aside, the novel is an immersive page-turner, and readers of any age will find themselves flipping forward to see how the story ends.
An exciting, distressing, and ultimately inspiring novel of hardship and family.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0990843030
Page Count: 176
Publisher: MB Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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