LaHaye and Jenkins are literally preaching to the choir here.
This latest addition to the Jesus Chronicles is a fictionalized retelling of the Gospel story of Luke the Physician, tracing his development from Stoic to believer to chronicler of the life of Jesus.
LaHaye and Jenkins (Mark’s Story: The Gospel According to Peter, 2007, etc.) have staked out some familiar and comfortable territory for themselves and their readers, who’ll find no surprises here. The authors pick up the story of Luke, or Loukon, when he’s a slave of Theophilus, an enlightened Stoic. Theophilus sees some promise in Luke and has him educated as a physician, feeling that Luke will eventually make a welcome addition to his household. Luke feels the resentment of other slaves, however, especially of the appropriately named Diabolos, who is clearly destined not to rise. At Tarsus Luke meets the charismatic Saul, the most brilliant and irascible student at the university. At the completion of Luke’s study, and with the approval of Theophilus, Luke works at a free clinic and also as a ship’s physician, and his path once again intersects with that of Saul, now Paul, whose conversion experience has a great influence on Luke. From this point the novel becomes a series of dialogues—or even Q & As—in which Luke queries Paul about his newfound faith. Paul’s responses are not just preparation for his later writing, they herald his biblical statements. In conversation with Luke, for example, Paul says, “Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us.” We obviously know where the story is headed. Shortly before Mary’s death Luke interviews the aged woman to get background for his retelling of the history of Jesus, and by the end of the book he’s finished his account of the apostles’ ministry.
LaHaye and Jenkins are literally preaching to the choir here.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-399-15523-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
Vivid prose isn’t enough to lift this book from its own excruciating depths.
An avid young Hitler supporter discovers that his parents have been hiding a Jewish girl in their house.
Johannes Betzler is a child in Vienna when Hitler comes to power and Austria votes for annexation. In school, he learns that “our race, the purest, didn’t have enough land” but that “the Führer had trust in us, the children; we were his future.” Johannes joins the Jungvolk and, once he’s old enough, the Hitler Youth. At home, meanwhile, his parents grow more and more discomfited; they’re quietly opposed to the Nazi party but well aware of the danger they’d be in if they voiced their opposition—even to their own son. Then, as a teenager, Johannes is maimed by a bomb, losing a hand and part of his cheekbone. Wounded, he returns home, where for months he is bedridden, alone in the house with his mother and grandmother. Increasingly, his father is—mysteriously—gone. His mother seems to be acting oddly and, finally, Johannes discovers the reason why: There is a girl, a Jewish girl, hidden upstairs in a secret partition. This is where Leunens’ (Primordial Soup, 2002) novel takes off. Johannes becomes increasingly fixated upon Elsa. At first, her existence prompts him to question his devotion to Hitler—is he betraying the Führer by not reporting his parents?—but as time goes on, and as Johannes’ preoccupation with Elsa grows more sexual, these doubts fade. Leunens is a strong writer, her prose supple and darkly engaging. Her depiction of wartime Vienna is nearly cinematic and utterly convincing. But it isn’t clear if Johannes is meant to be a sympathetic character, and as the novel goes on, and his choices grow more and more disturbing, it becomes harder to sympathize with him. Nor does he change, exactly, over the course of the book, although his circumstances certainly do. Ultimately, it’s unclear what Leunens’ larger purpose is. This is a dark, disturbing novel—but to what end?
Vivid prose isn’t enough to lift this book from its own excruciating depths.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3908-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
How Book Adaptations Fared at Golden Globe Noms
BOOK TO SCREEN
Workmanlike and less riveting than the subject matter.
Clayton’s (Beautiful Exiles, 2018, etc.) novel about the Kindertransport program joins the recent spate of Holocaust books (from All the Light We Cannot See to The Tattooist of Auschwitz) that allow readers to identity with heroes and survivors instead of victims.
The real-life heroine here is Truus Wijsmuller, the Dutch Christian woman instrumental in smuggling approximately 10,000 children out of the Reich and into England through the Kindertransport. The villain is the infamous Adolph Eichmann. Early in his career Eichmann authored the influential paper “The Jewish Problem,” about how to rid the Reich of Jews. After Germany took over Austria he landed a powerful position in Vienna. In 1938, Truus met with Eichmann, who offered what he assumed was an impossible deal: If she could arrange papers for exactly 600 healthy children to travel in one week’s time—on the Sabbath, when Jewish law forbids travel—he would allow safe passage. With help from British activists, Truus successfully made the arrangements and found refuge for all 600 children in England. Clayton intersects these historical figures and events with fictional characters trapped in Vienna. Aspiring playwright Stephan, 15 years old when the novel begins in 1936, comes from a wealthy Jewish family, manufacturers of highly prized chocolate candies. The Nazis strip ownership of the chocolate factory from Stephan’s father and hand it to Stephan’s Aryan Uncle Michael. A guilty collaborator torn between greed and love, Michael is the novel’s most realistically portrayed character, neither good nor entirely evil. Sensitive, brilliant, and precocious, Stephan is naturally drawn to equally sensitive, brilliant, and precocious Žofie-Helene, a math genius whose anti-Nazi father died under questionable circumstances and whose journalist mother writes the outspokenly anti-Nazi articles about actual events, like Britain’s limiting Jewish immigration and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, that punctuate the plot. After Kristallnacht Stephan ends up hiding in Vienna’s sewers (a weird nod to Orson Welles in The Third Man), and Žofie-Helene’s mother is arrested. Will Stephan and Žofie-Helene end up among the children Truus saves?
Workmanlike and less riveting than the subject matter.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-294693-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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