A multigenerational tale of cruelty, deception, and abuse that offers a vivid portrayal of its people, places, and period.
In this historical novel set in the antebellum South, slavers kidnap a free black girl and sell her into captivity.
Morton-Young (Nashville, Tennessee, 2000, etc.) focuses on the life of her actual great-grandmother Pleasant Lane. In 1845, slave traders abduct young Pleasant as she walks along a path in North Carolina. The story then flashes back many years to show Pleasant’s mother, Anika, as a child in Africa, her capture, and her grisly journey on a slave ship to America. Half the captives, including Anika’s brother, die en route, but she eventually winds up on a plantation in North Carolina. Years later, she gains her freedom thanks to the actions of her Northern-born mistress, Lucinda, “a breath of fresh air in a world of smoldering misery.” Per Lucinda’s will, Anika and her fellow former slaves receive land in “an overgrown, deserted settlement” that they name FreeLane. There, Anika gives birth to Pleasant and hopes to provide her with a better life. After Pleasant’s own abduction years later, her captors sell her in Tennessee, and she becomes a house slave for a plantation’s terrible mistress. At the end of the Civil War, Pleasant regains her freedom when Union soldiers arrive. Later, her daughter dies while giving birth, so she raises her grandchild—the author’s mother. This novel gives a vivid account of the brutalities, humiliations, and hardships of slavery. It captures “all [the] laws and contradictions” of the white man’s world but also, more generally, plumbs the depths of “human behavior, its quirks and audacities.” Morton-Young provides nuanced portraits of her characters, and her descriptions of plantation life are colorful and strong, from the daily abuse of slaves and how “human life was so wasted” to the occasional small pleasures that slaves could find on the sly. The prose style can be odd at times, though; it’s laced with inexplicable italics and clichés such as “his blood boiled.” Still, the story’s hard truths and all-too-human characters make it a heartfelt read.
A multigenerational tale of cruelty, deception, and abuse that offers a vivid portrayal of its people, places, and period.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5035-1528-4
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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