Gripping and heart-wrenching; historically important, with contemporary relevance.
Stratmann’s debut novel draws from her own experience as a young Greek child taken from her family to be adopted by an American couple.
It’s 1958 in the small Greek village of Pirgos. Sousanna is a happy 5-year-old, the youngest child of Niko and Katerina Demetriou. Niko is a farmworker, tending the fields with his 8-year-old son, Ilias (11-year-old Marios has just left home), desperately poor, and struggling to feed his family. Greece itself is reeling from the devastation of the Great Depression, World War II, and the subsequent Greek civil war. Enter Peter Bakas, an American lawyer who finds Greek orphans to place with black-market adoptive parents in the United States—except he no longer confines himself to orphans. Now he prefers to find children who have not been physically and emotionally scarred by the overflowing orphanages. That means paying parents to give up their children; in some cases, it means effectively stealing them under false pretenses. This is what happens to Sousanna. Peter says to Niko: “Let me take her to America, where she will have a good life. When things are better she will come home to you again. You are a wise man, Niko. This life is not your fault, but keeping Sousanna here to suffer will be.” He deceptively promises this will be temporary, that there will be letters and photographs. The novel is narrated by Sousanna in the present tense, and we hear the tearful frightened child, the angry teenager, and the young, married adult. Interspersed third-person-narration chapters fill in details about Peter and about the pain and anger that almost destroyed Sousanna’s Greek family. The author provides a closing synopsis of historical context through which to understand how this could happen. She tells us that this “is also, sadly, the story of thousands of other children and their families.” Family photos remind readers this is more than a novel.
Gripping and heart-wrenching; historically important, with contemporary relevance.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9904977-8-3
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Tranquility Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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