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 laugh-out-loud funny book that will delight longtime Kinsella fans and those looking for a cozy holiday story.
Kinsella’s (I Owe You One, 2019, etc.) much-loved Shopaholic is back—and this time, it’s Christmas.
Becky Brandon is looking forward to spending Christmas with her husband and daughter at her parents’ house, just like always. It’s cozy and warm and, other than her favorite Christmas tradition (shopping), Becky doesn’t have to do much of anything. But then her parents drop a huge surprise—they’re moving to an apartment in the superhip London neighborhood of Shoreditch. Now, instead of Christmas sweaters and carols, they’re into unicycles and avocado toast. Her parents’ transformation into hipsters means that Becky has to host Christmas at her home in Letherby. Becky has no idea how to host a holiday dinner for her entire family and extended network of family friends, but she’s never met a problem she couldn’t shop her way out of. As usual, however, Becky finds herself stuck with a ton of problems. First, she needs to find the perfect gift for her husband, Luke, but in order to get it she just might have to petition an all-male billiards club to accept female members (Becky, of course, doesn’t play billiards). She might be in trouble with the entire country of Norway after creating her own (fictional) version of hygge, “sprygge.” Her environmentally conscious sister wants Becky to decorate a broom instead of a Christmas tree and have a vegan turkey on the table. And then there’s her musician ex-boyfriend who unexpectedly shows up in town with his new girlfriend. With everything on Becky’s plate, will she be able to create the picture-perfect Christmas she dreams of? Becky is still a hardworking, eminently lovable character who just wants to do the right thing, even if she usually screws everything up and finds herself in hilariously awful situations (like, for example, storing 30 pounds of smoked salmon on her front lawn under a duvet).
A laugh-out-loud funny book that will delight longtime Kinsella fans and those looking for a cozy holiday story.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13282-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
A meandering and didactic family saga by Chickasaw poet, novelist, and essayist Hogan (Dwellings, p. 835; Mean Spirit, 1990), a tale that attemptsÖ la Little Big Manto rewrite the history of the American West from a Native American perspective. At 17, Angela Jensen decides that it's time to untangle her family, a process she begins by going hometo a remote village in western Canada called Adam's Rib, a place she no longer even recognizes. Angela looks up Agnes Iron, her great-grandmother, whom she's never met, and is soon introduced to Bush, who looked after Angela's deranged mother, Hannah, and raised Angela herself after Hannah's early death. At first, it is information about her motherstories, accounts, explanationsthat most interests Angela, but eventually she understands that the history of her family is woven tightly into the history of her family's tribe and the bloody strife that has colored their lives ever since the white men came among them: ``For us, hell was cleared forests and killed animals. But for them, hell was this world in all its plenitude.'' The troubles have been carried down to the present day, except that now the threat is comprised not of missionaries and European settlers but of government authorities who want to develop the land out of existence through the construction of a mammoth hydroelectric power plant. As her consciousness is raised, Angela begins to recognize her real identity but desires, and the anger that she labors under throughoutand that finds expression mainly in the crudest caricatures of Western culture and North American history imaginableis relieved by the happy fulfillment of her romantic (rather than political) life: a fairy-tale marriage that seems in this terrain to be even more out-of-place than the dam would have been. Tediously obvious and overwritten; Hogan's characters are so excruciatingly limited to the representation of their cultures that they become little more than allegories, reducing the tale to agitprop.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-81227-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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