An uneven novel, but readers interested in modern ranching and the history of West Texas will likely find much to enjoy.
A New Yorker, a cowboy, a Mexican and others meet at a West Texas ranch in Davis’ (How to Not Go Broke Ranching, 2011, etc.) novel about love, life and cattle raising.
When Bart Ryan unexpectedly inherits half of a Texas ranch, he doesn’t hesitate to move there from New York; he’s the sort of young man who daydreams using a road atlas. Mac Connley, the owner of the ranch’s other half, is an old cowboy who could use a new partner after a “lifetime of being bucked off, knocked down, run over, kicked, and stepped on.” When Emiliano Cortez, a widower, walks over the border from Mexico and breaks his leg near the ranch, Mac rescues him and hires him on, unbothered by his undocumented status: “He figured anybody that was willing to walk two or three hundred miles looking for work had character if he didn’t have nothing else.” Running the ranch has its challenges, including several years of drought and, especially, a lack of capital. But a cache of gold, hidden somewhere on the ranch, could solve that problem—if the men can find it. Through the novel, Davis intersperses historical vignettes about the region’s fascinating multicultural history (featuring Kiowa, Tonkawa, Comanche, Scots-Irish and German people), which provides background for the novel’s present-day story. The author knows this milieu and uses authentic details of ranching life to good effect. He also takes the opportunity to promote his views, which are sensible, humane and well-balanced (“happy cattle make more money”), but they give the novel a textbook-like feel at times. The book would also have benefited from a stronger edit; there are frequent punctuation problems, and not all the episodes deserve the space given them. Although Davis’ main characters are varied and likeable, the plot has little true conflict; problems vanish, plans come easily to fruition, everyone gets along, bad guys get their comeuppance and dreams come true.
An uneven novel, but readers interested in modern ranching and the history of West Texas will likely find much to enjoy.Pub Date: June 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475196184
Page Count: 354
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2013
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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