Strikingly original and thematically complex. Readers who like to be challenged will devour this—and wonder eagerly what...
A wet nurse in 14th-century France sustains an entire town with her milk during a siege.
In 1349, 15-year-old Blanche was miraculously borne aloft in church as the inhabitants of Villeneuve prayed for deliverance from pestilence. Townsfolk gave her the surname Mirabilis (“astonishing”), venerating Blanche until it became clear she was pregnant. In 1362, her 12-year-old daughter, Bonne Tardieu (“God’s bastard”), watched as Blanche perished in the church set ablaze by those same townsfolk. Now Bonne is 22, living on precarious sufferance as a wet nurse in an insular society brilliantly re-created, from the physical filth of the streets and the residents (who seldom have a chance to bathe) to the political machinations of the priests and the powerful. Though her illegitimate baby died six years ago, Bonne keeps her milk flowing between jobs by suckling her friend Godfridus, a journeyman carver working on the new church who dreams of praising God in his own, innovative sculpture. Hired by wealthy, pregnant widow Radegonde Putemonnoie, who feeds her lavishly to improve her milk, Bonne flourishes even as the English besiege Villeneuve: an attack by a starving artisan shows her how she can nourish the hungry town. Baroque though the story developments are (Bonne also rescues Hercule, a seeming child who turns out to be a dwarf fleeing his murderous noble master), Cokal’s elegant prose never stresses the weirdness, focusing instead on the characters’ longings for love and transcendence. Bitter, provocative Hercule and tormented Godfridus are strong supporting players, as are a power-mongering priest and a bakerwoman who voices the volatile emotions of the town masses, ready to cry “saint!” one moment and “witch!” the next. Proud, secretive Radegonde seems closest to the author, who views the medieval church with a sardonic eye but keeps an open mind about the “miracles” that overcrowd the close of an otherwise meticulously plotted and thoughtfully developed first novel.
Strikingly original and thematically complex. Readers who like to be challenged will devour this—and wonder eagerly what this adventurous newcomer will do next.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14753-5
Page Count: 389
Publisher: BlueHen/Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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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