A serious set of meditations on communism delivered with style and wit.
An eclectic gathering of short stories illustrating the burden of communism.
Domanski’s debut collects stories, often based in truth, devoted to Polish anti-communist activists. The brief pieces, some barely two pages, aim to capture the moral confusion and physical deprivation wrought by authoritarian communistic rule. Besides functioning as cautionary tales about tyranny begotten from political idealism, each one is like a moral parable, describing a struggle the author encountered. For example, in “Hen,” the narrator’s mother steals a hen to feed her family, justifying her crime by pointing out that hungry neighbors often purloin her own hens. The author was made complicit in the crime by being compelled to withhold the truth, but his guilt and desire to tell the truth were overcome by his love of the taste of fresh chicken broth. In “Crystals,” the author, only 15 years old at the time, recalls living under German occupation and discovering an abandoned store stocked with fine crystal. To spite the Germans, his crew smashed them all. He was later admonished by his mother for this act of wanton destruction, but, mired in poverty, he had never seen crystal and had no idea these were objects of great expense. Despite the tales’ serious subject matter, Domanski maintains a surprisingly lighthearted tone, injecting his prose with considerable humor. In “Bees,” a swarm of bees that continually attacks government figures is labeled anti-communist. While tightly centered on a common theme, the stories needn’t be read all at once or sequentially; each stands on its own. The author admits that some of these remembrances are woven out of both fact and fiction—and some are simply fictional—but this doesn’t detract from the power of the writing’s moral instruction. Never tediously didactic, this is a beautifully written collection of historically poignant vignettes.
A serious set of meditations on communism delivered with style and wit.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-8-36-419509-9
Page Count: 266
Publisher: LENA Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Thriller fans will find so much space devoted to Gia and Jake’s sexual acrobatics that little time is left for the plot to...
A small Tennessee mountain town is awash in sex and scandal in Belle’s first novel.
Gia Andrews, a disaster relief worker, is also a convicted murderer’s daughter. Her father, Ray, was convicted of killing his wife and Gia’s stepmother, Ella Mae, and sentenced to life in prison. But Ray is dying, and prison officials are releasing him on compassionate grounds; Gia’s uncle Cal, a prominent lawyer, has recruited her to return home from Kenya to care for her dad in his home in Rogersville. Despite the fact that she hasn’t seen her father since she left many years ago, she returns, believing her brother, Bo, and sister, Lexi, will help her, but she finds that neither wants anything to do with their father. Her nearest allies turn out to be the home-care worker Uncle Cal has hired, Fannie, and the new man she meets, a bar-and-grill owner named Jake. When Gia meets a law professor planning to write a book about wrongful convictions, he tells her he believes Ray didn’t kill Ella Mae and that Cal, who was Ray’s attorney, didn’t mount much of a defense. After looking into these allegations, Gia discovers her stepmother had an affair with another man and wonders whether her father could be innocent after all. While trying to unravel the mystery of who really killed Ella Mae, things heat up between Gia and Jake, and suddenly the mystery takes a whole new direction. Belle’s a smooth writer whose characters are vibrant and truly reflect the area where the novel is set, but the plot—while clever—takes a back seat to Gia’s and Ella Mae’s separate, but equally steamy, sexual exploits.
Thriller fans will find so much space devoted to Gia and Jake’s sexual acrobatics that little time is left for the plot to develop.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1722-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
The late (d. 1988), leathery, awesomely unstoppable (over 100 books still in print) L’Amour, still producing fluently from his grave (End of the Drive, 1997), offers one more gathering of unpublished tales, proving again that great writing laughs at death. Showing sheer contempt for slow openings, L’Amour’s seven newly discovered short stories offer some breath-catching first paragraphs echoing with the cold steel click of a Colt .45 hammer being cocked. The lead story, “The Man from Utah,” polishes L’Amour’s walnut prose to its glossiest grain. Bearing a fearsome reputation as a gunfighter, Marshall Utah Blaine arrives in Squaw Creek to investigate 14 recent murders (three were marshals) by a cunning bandit masquerading as an upright citizen. By a process of deduction, the shrewd Blaine narrows his suspects down until he has the killer. “Here Ends the Trail” opens with a High L’Amouresque Miltonic Inversion: “Cold was the night and bitter the wind and brutal the trail behind. Hunched in the saddle, I growled at the dark and peered through the blinding rain. The agony of my wound was a white-hot flame from the bullet of Korry Gleason.” This builds to an explosive climax that mixes vengeance with great-heartedness. “Battle at Burnt Camp,” “Ironwood Station” and “The Man from the Dead Hills” all live up to the melodrama of their blue-steel titles. “Strawhouse Trail” opens memorably with the line: “He looked through his field glasses into the eyes of a dying man.” And never lets up. The title novella tells of Lona Markham’s unwilling engagement to six-foot-five, 250-pound, harsh-lipped Frank Mailer, who has “blue, slightly glassy eyes.” Will Lance Kilkenny, the mysterious Black Rider, save her from indestructible Mailer? Stinging stories of powerful men against landscapes you can strike a match on.
Pub Date: May 11, 1998
ISBN: 0-553-10833-6
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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