A high-energy saga about love and betrayal filled with vibrant details about Roman history.
In this novel, a young Roman girl’s future becomes derailed when Emperor Nero impregnates her in C.E. 61.
Sixteen-year-old Antonia Plautina sets out for Rome, four years after giving birth to Nero’s child, with the intention of persuading the emperor to acknowledge the little girl that resulted from the night he assaulted her. Nero raped Antonia when he visited her father’s house when she was only 12. Antonia’s pregnancy and the illegitimate child have brought such shame to her household that her family has gradually lost everything. As a last resort, Antonia enlists the help of the clan’s former slave, Nikolaos, and travels to Rome to confront the emperor. When Nero learns about his child, he worries his enemies will try to use the girl against him somehow. To ensure his daughter’s safety, Nero orders Antonia to marry Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus, a middle-aged Celtic king, and to relocate with him to his homeland in Brittania. Worse yet, Togidubnus is already married to another woman he adores. When Togidubnus protests, the emperor simply declares the existing union void, marrying the new couple instantly. After enduring a harrowing boat ride to the island of Brittania, Antonia is disappointed by the comparatively primitive conditions awaiting her there, and Togidubnus is devastated by the rift that this new arrangement necessarily causes between him and his former wife, Breca. Antonia and Togidubnus must figure out a way to move forward as allies despite their distress at being stranded with each other. As Antonia and Togidbnus are dealt one blow after another, this action-packed tale should keep readers engaged. Finch (Myths, Metaphors, and Science Fiction, 2014, etc.) employs a straightforward prose and provides rich history about the Roman Empire during the first century, focusing especially on the reign of Nero and the control he extended far beyond Rome. The many specifics about Roman architecture, city planning, and inventions lend authenticity to the tale (Togidubnus “loved the new white temples, the tall buildings housing apartments and inns, the wide straight streets, the bustle and country smells of the markets—ripe cheese, garlic, sausage—the aqueducts bringing fresh mountain water to the city’s flowing fountains”). In addition, the narrative is chock full of timeless human emotions.
A high-energy saga about love and betrayal filled with vibrant details about Roman history.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9971188-3-4
Page Count: 315
Publisher: Hadley Rille Books
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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