A multifaceted tale of faith and perseverance.
A married couple decides to open a Holocaust museum in Alaska.
Goldsmith’s sequel to his 2015 novel, The Rabbi of Resurrection Bay, finds his two main characters, Rabbi Chani Kahn and her husband, Dr. Marc Cohn, dealing with new trials at their home in Resurrection Bay, Alaska. And one of the most dramatic of those challenges crops up literally on Page 1 of this new book when Marc gets a midnight phone call summoning him to a highly confidential emergency meeting in Jerusalem. Marc is stunned when he’s told that “the future of Israel” is in his hands. Strings are pulled, rapid transport is arranged, and soon Marc and Chani are face to face with the prime minister of Israel, being briefed on a tense situation. The leader of one of the few nations willing to supply Israel with the plutonium it needs in order to continue its clandestine nuclear weapons program has emerged from a coup attempt with a badly damaged face. The skills Marc acquired in his pre-Alaska life as a plastic surgeon are now needed to restore the leader’s appearance and keep the plutonium flowing. From this running start, the author rapidly expands his narrative in branching, interconnected stories, one featuring the emotional and even legal aftereffects Marc experiences when he takes on the mission for Israel and another starring Chani. She’s diagnosed with Raynaud’s disease, which makes her extraordinarily sensitive to cold temperatures. She also starts investigating her own past after visiting the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem. These plot threads come together in the efforts of the couple to establish a Holocaust Heroes Museum in Alaska. Somehow, Goldsmith manages to balance all of these disparate plotlines so smoothly that no single strand dominates the others and all work well together. The author is an earnest and unpretentious prose stylist, and he turns his overstuffed story into compelling reading.
A multifaceted tale of faith and perseverance.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-67-983191-9
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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