Never flinching from the bleak, this sweeping historical romance pieces together hope from the ruins.
In January 1941, as a pogrom descends upon the Jews of Bucharest, Romania, a fleeing Jewish couple must make a horrifying decision: leave their 3-year-old daughter behind or risk all of their lives at the hands of the Iron Guard. Their daughter survives, and her life arcs through some of the most devastating events of Eastern Europe.
Soon adopted into a wealthy Christian family, the child is renamed Natalia and raised by loving parents, Despina and Anton Goza. After four heart-wrenching miscarriages, Despina is eager to shower Natalia with love, drawing the traumatized girl out of her shell. Anton, the owner of several successful stationery stores, dotes on Despina and Natalia, even buying Natalia a piano and engaging a teacher for the talented pupil. Although politically opposed to fascism, the Gozas’ wealth shelters them from the atrocities visited daily upon their city’s Jewish population. Meanwhile, Natalia’s birthparents have been hiding in the attic of Despina’s cousin, who helps them escape the country, yet from afar, they try to help their daughter. From the pogroms and bombings to the Soviet occupation and the fall of the Iron Curtain, debut novelist Veletzos deftly threads historical events through Natalia’s life story as she survives the fracturing of her biological family, the destruction of her country, the stifling of her education, and cultural isolation from the rest of the world. As Natalia navigates a swiftly changing landscape, her adoptive father befriends Victor, a political revolutionary, who rises in the ranks of the Communist regime. In their times of need, it will be Victor to whom the Gozas turn again and again. But can he be trusted to rescue the fallen bourgeois family? Above all, can he be trusted with Natalia’s heart? And will Natalia ever find her parents again?
Never flinching from the bleak, this sweeping historical romance pieces together hope from the ruins.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8768-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Pevear's informative introduction and numerous helpful explanatory notes help make this the essential Anna Karenina.
The husband-and-wife team who have given us refreshing English versions of Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Chekhov now present their lucid translation of Tolstoy's panoramic tale of adultery and society: a masterwork that may well be the greatest realistic novel ever written. It's a beautifully structured fiction, which contrasts the aristocratic world of two prominent families with the ideal utopian one dreamed by earnest Konstantin Levin (a virtual self-portrait). The characters of the enchanting Anna (a descendant of Flaubert's Emma Bovary and Fontane's Effi Briest, and forerunner of countless later literary heroines), the lover (Vronsky) who proves worthy of her indiscretion, her bloodless husband Karenin and ingenuous epicurean brother Stiva, among many others, are quite literally unforgettable. Perhaps the greatest virtue of this splendid translation is the skill with which it distinguishes the accents of Anna's romantic egoism from the spare narrative clarity with which a vast spectrum of Russian life is vividly portrayed.
Pevear's informative introduction and numerous helpful explanatory notes help make this the essential Anna Karenina.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89478-8
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
PERSPECTIVES
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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