by Sousanna Stratmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 31, 2018
Gripping and heart-wrenching; historically important, with contemporary relevance.
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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
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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