An engrossing mystery wrapped in a coming-of-age story and the heart-rending legacy of the Holocaust.
A young Jewish woman searches for her lost uncle in Israel during the harrowing trial of Adolf Eichmann in Bernstein’s novel.
In 1961, Susan Reich, a first-generation Jewish teenager raised in an Irish Catholic neighborhood in New York City, is not the dutiful Zionist of her father Yehudah’s wishes. She wants to travel before going off to college, a plan her domineering father will only support if she goes to Israel to investigate the fate of his brother, Yakov, who disappeared after the Germans invaded Poland during World War II 20 years earlier. With little information to go on, Susan arrives in Jerusalem at a time of tumult and mourning as Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal and one of the principal architects of the Holocaust, is put on trial. As she listens to heartbreaking accounts of survivors in the course of the search for her uncle, she struggles with what it means to be a Jew. When she falls for Ezra, a Moroccan man in her Hebrew language class, she sees firsthand the impoverished conditions and prejudice his people face as non-European Jews. The experiences of Ruth, a waitress and Holocaust survivor whom Susan befriends on her quest, raise complex and contradictory ideas about love, rape, power, fear, and survival during the most horrific of times. The author brings the troubled young nation of Israel alive on the page, with trash-filled alleyways, smoke-filled cafes, and the pall of the Eichmann trial hanging over everything. The novel has a noirlike quality (“Around them, they heard the sounds of neighborhood cats yowling in the darkness. When she first heard them, Susan thought they were babies crying”), which, along with recurring themes of identity, history, culture, ethnicity, and sexuality, makes for an immersive detective novel. Bernstein’s story is no mere exercise in pulp—the narrative leans into the disturbing physical imagery and emotional fallout of the Holocaust while vividly capturing the tenor of Israel in 1961. This compelling, character-driven story will captivate even those with limited knowledge of Jewish history, the Nazis, or Eichmann and teach valuable lessons along the way.
An engrossing mystery wrapped in a coming-of-age story and the heart-rending legacy of the Holocaust.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2022
ISBN: 9789493276376
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Amsterdam Publishers
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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