A sensitive portrayal of a sensitive spirit facing challenges in a complex era.
A shy young Jewish boy growing up in mid-20th-century New York City experiences feelings of inadequacy and alienation at a boys summer camp in Steinberg’s debut novel.
Ten-year-old Albie Greenberg enjoys using his father’s binoculars to observe people from a distance from his apartment window. The boy feels very much apart from others, in part due to a “sense of strangeness” that permeates his family. He’s a sensitive and introverted child who seeks refuge in books and dreams from a world in which he doesn’t seem to fit. When his parents enthusiastically announce that he’ll be going away to Bear Lake sports camp for the summer, he understands instinctively that the vigorous atmosphere of male athletics won’t be for him. Once there, he immediately becomes the target of bullying from other boys and from counselors who punish disobedience and vulnerability with painful “noogies.” Albie finds his only friends among a handful of other “unwelcome and inept” boys. The atmosphere of danger only increases when the camp is placed under quarantine for polio. Albie finds that there’s a darkness in him as well as fantasies of escape. In re-creating Albie’s inner conflict, Steinberg’s narrative skillfully evokes the postwar trauma and denial that characterized 1950s America. For example, his immigrant father’s hearty attempts to assimilate into American culture seem to be part of an effort to put an ominous past behind him; the author also shows the effects of trauma on Albie’s uncle and grandparents and how his mother only cultivates a brittle optimism with the aid of regular purchases at the liquor store. The camp is a particularly vivid microcosm of a larger society that’s torn between dark fears and bluff arrogance. A brief flash-forward scene in which an older Albie visits relatives in Zurich feels more like a tantalizing distraction than a satisfying revelation. Overall, though, the novel is a realistic and affecting examination of the effects of societal pressure.
A sensitive portrayal of a sensitive spirit facing challenges in a complex era.Pub Date: March 31, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73602-860-5
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Forsesi Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
