Stimulating and enriching.
Seventeen stories by Vreeland, known for her delicate fictional investigations of painters’ lives (The Forest Lover, 2004, etc.), explore the interpenetration of existence and art.
Eight of the tales (“firmly based in research,” declares the author) evoke incidents from the lives of Impressionist and other early modern painters. Renoir, Monet (twice), Manet, Berthe Morisot, van Gogh, Cézanne, and Modigliani are seen by, among others, a gardener, a wet nurse, a butcher’s child, a banker, and a daughter. “Mimi with a Watering Can,” though hardly more than a sketch, is bathed in the same warmth that floods Renoir’s paintings. In “Winter of Abandon,” Monet paints his wife immediately after her death, with love and artistic calculation entwined; years later at Giverny (“A Flower for Ginette”), he struggles with Water Lilies. The two standouts are “Olympia’s Look” and “The Yellow Jacket.” The former shows Manet’s devoted widow Suzanne dealing with his former models after his death from syphilis. In the latter, van Gogh paints an apprehensive military recruit in Arles and, through the brilliant élan of his coloring, hands the fellow a future. “The Cure,” an exuberant albeit hokey detour into the 17th century, sends two peasants to Rome to absorb art and religion. Moving into the present (and the entirely fictional), Vreeland demonstrates how art liberates in such tales as “Respond,” which depicts a neglected wife coming alive when she models nude for a sculpture class, and “Gifts,” which chronicles the transformation of a prison visit by a teenager’s drawing. Most strikingly, in “Their Lady Tristeza,” a student’s outline of a Matisse nude miraculously evolves into an image of the Virgin Mary that refuses to disappear. A construction worker on his first visit to a museum can’t handle his girlfriend’s lectures in “The Things He Didn’t Know,” one of a handful of overschematic stories. Cumulatively, however, the collection reminds us that the bountiful promise of art is everywhere.
Stimulating and enriching.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03177-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fascinating look at an underexplored chapter of American history.
In the 1940s, Americans—many of them with no idea what they're doing—work together to create an atomic bomb.
June Walker is just 18 when she moves to Oak Ridge, a town situated within a restricted military area, to work at her first job. Along with many other young women, she's instructed to watch the meters and adjust the dials in front of her—she gets no other information about what she is doing. Surrounded by signs with slogans like “What you do here, what you see here, what you hear here, let it stay here,” the women are ordered to avoid telling their friends and family anything about Oak Ridge. Most of the women June works alongside are able to easily avoid worrying about the true purpose of their work, content to distract themselves with flirting and nightly dances. But not everyone at Oak Ridge is in the dark about the weapon they’re building; Sam Cantor, a Jewish scientist, knows that the workers of Oak Ridge are rushing to create an atomic bomb that will hopefully end the war. When he and June begin a romance and he tells June what she’s working on, she must deal with the knowledge that she’s creating a devastating weapon. Although June’s and Sam’s voices are most prominent, Beard (Beneath the Pines, 2008) also explores two more points of view: those of Cici, June’s social striver roommate, and Joe, an African-American construction worker who faces segregation and poor living conditions. The characters, especially June, are well-drawn and sympathetic. Numerous real photos of Oak Ridge are included, which add visual interest to an already compelling story. Fans of historical fiction will devour this complex and human look at the people involved in the creation of the atomic bomb.
A fascinating look at an underexplored chapter of American history.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-266671-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
A spellbinding portrait of what it means to be human in an inhuman world.
In this tale of a young German Jewish girl under the protection of a golem—a magical creature of Jewish myth created from mud and water—Hoffman (The Rules of Magic, 2017, etc.) employs her signature lyricism to express the agony of the Holocaust with a depth seldom equaled in more seemingly realistic accounts.
The golem, named Ava, comes into being in 1941 Berlin. Recently made a widow by the Gestapo and desperate to get her 12-year-old daughter, Lea, out of Germany, Hanni Kohn hires Ettie, a rabbi’s adolescent daughter who has witnessed her father creating a golem, to make a female creature who must obey Hanni by protecting Lea at all costs. Ettie uses Hanni’s payment to escape on the same train toward France as Lea and Ava, but the two human girls’ lives take different paths. Ettie, who has always chafed at the limits placed on her gender, becomes a Resistance fighter set on avenging her younger sister’s killing by Nazis. Lea, under Ava’s supernatural care, escapes the worst ravages of the war, staying first with distant cousins in Paris (already under Gestapo rule), where she falls in love with her hosts' 14-year-old son, Julien; then in a convent school hiding Jewish girls in the Rhone Valley; then in a forest village not far from where Ettie has partnered in her Resistance activities with Julien’s older brother. While Lea’s experiences toughen and mature her, Ettie never stops mourning her sister but finds something like love with a gentle gentile doctor who has his own heartbreaking backstory. In fact, everyone in the large cast of supporting human characters—as well as the talking heron that is Ava’s love interest and Azriel, the Angel of Death—becomes vividly real, but Ava the golem is the heart of the book. Representing both fierce maternal love and the will to survive, she forces Lea and Ettie to examine their capacities to make ethical choices and to love despite impossible circumstances.
A spellbinding portrait of what it means to be human in an inhuman world.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3757-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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