The most recent (1998) of Germain's highly charged Gothic antiromances set in the French countryside (close kin to her The Book of Nights and Night of Amber) is a quirky retelling of the biblical apocryphal tale of Tobias. Its principal characters—both hyper-real and ineffably striking—include a guileless wayfarer, his pragmatic guardian angel, and a beautiful young woman who is either an innocent virgin or Death's handmaiden on earth (if, indeed, not both). Germain's atmospheric landscapes are clogged with haunting detail, but her people are so freighted with garish eccentricities and mythic resonances that it's often initially difficult to credit their reality. Once you've entered her hothouse fictional world, however, there's no resisting its gorgeous, impossible density and seductiveness. An acquired taste, her ineffably odd books are nevertheless highly accomplished performances.
Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2000
ISBN: 1-873982-39-9
Page Count: 196
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Riley’s obtuseness makes her a uniquely incompetent detective, an investigative reporter constantly surprised by...
Another hot tip from her best informant, her mother, leads TV reporter Riley Spartz (Killing Kate, 2011, etc.) far from the Twin Cities to a murder among the Amish community in misnamed Harmony, Minn.
There was little enough chance of identifying the dead woman who’d been stripped naked, wrapped in a homemade quilt, and dumped in a sinkhole weeks before Josh Kueppers, 10, falls into the hole with the corpse and blows off her face with his shotgun in a panic. Since there are no photos available of the victim and the whole drama is playing out far from Channel 3’s market audience, Riley’s lecherous new boss, news director Bryce Griffin, isn’t eager to turn her loose on the story. But once the dead woman is identified as Sarah Yoder, 18, Riley persuades Griffin to send her back to Harmony, only to get predictably stiffed by Sarah’s mother, Miriam, Bishop Abram Stoltzfus and the rest of the closemouthed Amish. Only Linda Kloeckner, the Lamplight Inn owner who put up Sarah when she ran away from home shortly after committing her life to the community, and Isaac Hochstetler, who briefly employed her at Everything Amish, are willing to talk to Riley, and their information doesn’t do much to sensitize the reporter who asks her confessor, Father Mountain, whether ritual shunning by the Amish community is “worse than unfriending someone on Facebook.” No wonder a pair of attackers break into Riley’s room at the Lamplight Inn and (gasp!) cut her hair.
Riley’s obtuseness makes her a uniquely incompetent detective, an investigative reporter constantly surprised by developments less likely to ambush seasoned genre fans.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6463-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
A predictable romance tempers the energy of this tale about the healing powers of love.
Having escaped from a train headed to Auschwitz, Vera and Edith, two young Hungarian women, mourn their parents as well as Edith’s fiance, all likely lost to the Holocaust. Can they forge new lives in the postwar world?
After surviving the war by working on a farm, Vera and Edith realize their hometown of Budapest holds little promise. Fortuitously, a kind American officer sends them to Naples with a letter recommending Vera to the embassy. Once there, Vera, who is fluent in five languages, readily secures a job as secretary to Capt. Anton Wight, an American officer at the embassy. She’s intent upon taking care of Edith, who’s looking for male attention, which she finds with Marcus, a photographer ready to sweep her away dancing and maybe into social ruin. But it’s Vera who falls in love first, with the dashing Capt. Wight, who treats her to dinner dates and gifts. Although Vera tells Anton about her experiences during the war, including her guilt over surviving while her family presumably perished in the gas chambers, her attraction to him quickly outweighs any lingering trauma. However, Anton’s struggles with his own past derail their romance, plunging Vera into more heartache as her path traverses the globe. The romance between Vera and Capt. Wight is, unfortunately, much too easy, beginning with its inevitable whirlwind courtship. Publishing for the first time under her birth name, Abriel (Christmas in Vermont, 2019, etc., written as Anita Hughes) was inspired by her mother's life, and she deftly sketches the postwar world from Naples to Venezuela and Australia, with attention paid to the changed architectural and emotional landscapes. The rubble of bombed cities, the blank map of lost relatives, and the uncertainty of day-to-day survival outline the anguish of the lost generation.
A predictable romance tempers the energy of this tale about the healing powers of love.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2297-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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