A historically authentic but fictionally unfocused Soviet story.
A young boy, born into the tumult of World War II, grows up under the harsh tyranny of the Soviet Union in this novel.
David Lamm’s birth is spectacularly inauspicious—he comes into the world on June 22, 1941, the same day Germany attacks his native Beltsy, Moldova. His father, Samuel, leaves shortly after his birth to fulfill his military obligations. His mother, Ilana, eventually takes newborn David and his 9-year-old brother, Victor, to see Samuel’s brother, Aron, in Dnepropetrovsk, a town in Ukraine. They leave just in time—when the Nazis arrive, they mercilessly terrorize Beltsy—Ilana’s sister is raped and her mother murdered. The train ride traverses 4,500 kilometers, and when they arrive, Aron refuses to house them for long and sends them to a nearby refugee center, where their lives become freighted with “miserable poverty and chronic hunger.” The Lamms are eventually reunited, and return to find their home in Beltsy occupied by a KGB captain who refuses to leave until courts order him to. Tsesis (Communist Daze, 2017) closely follows David’s life, thoughtfully focusing on the ways in which his perilous circumstances expedited his maturation from cheerful youth to wise adolescent. In advance of yet another move, he learns he will never again see a childhood friend, a moment that inspires a revelation: “He understood that nothing in this world is permanent.” David eventually discovers his father is really an anti-Communist, and learns about the cruel dysfunction of Soviet authoritarianism and socialism. The author’s knowledge of the period is remarkable, and he furnishes an unvarnished vision of the time’s rampant anti-Semitism. Further, Tsesis sharply parses the elitist hypocrisy that undergirded the Soviet Union’s propaganda about egalitarian sacrifice—while so much of the country starved, a small ruling portion lived like robber barons. But the narrative, after a dramatically thrilling beginning, becomes a meandering series of impressionistic anecdotes, many of them anticlimactically quotidian. In addition, the manuscript is in need of a through edit (“When they ran out on the balcony of their apartment, they saw a red haze on horizon from the unrelenting blasts and fires produced by German airplanes”).
A historically authentic but fictionally unfocused Soviet story.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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