Expertly paced, eminently readable, and a promising start.
The city is burning indeed in New Yorker contributor Platzer’s debut novel, sometimes with fire and sometimes with much-compounded shame.
Aaron was once a rabbi, at least until he got caught with his hand in the synagogue's bank account, desperately trying to settle a gambling debt that involved organized crime, death threats, and suchlike mishegoss. Now, supposedly on the straight and narrow, though filled with epic doubts—“Belief had never been at the core of his rabbinical path,” Platzer writes, though Aaron is fully certain of an inner rottenness that has kept God from stepping in on his behalf—he is the father of a baby son born to his girlfriend, Amelia, who writes service journalism pieces well below her capabilities. As the book opens, Aaron, now an investment banker, is contemplating just how fortunate he is to have found his way to this place—this place in life, that is, but also Bed-Stuy, in a beautiful home with nice neighbors. Others are not so lucky: a 12-year-old African-American boy is slain by a police officer in a nearby park, an event all too close to real life for so many citizens of Brooklyn and other cities. As protests and upheaval shake the streets, Amelia is called down for white privilege, Aaron gets caught up between cops and kids, and their carefully reconstructed life threatens to fall apart. Platzer is very good at doling out details of Aaron’s tightly wound character and Amelia’s reciprocal doubts, finding redemptions for both that, though not unlikely, do have a certain deus ex machina feel, given the distances each has to travel. In a story tinged with biblical allegory, Platzer also serves up some delicious set pieces for his supporting players. One of the best of them involves a young black woman recently escaped from arrest at an anti-police demonstration and wandering from store to store in the neighborhood trying to cash an improbably large check that she’s come into. (And therein hangs a tale.) She can’t, less because of the broken handcuffs trailing from her wrists than because she doesn’t have proper ID. Notes a bemused clerk, “And they tell me gentrification isn’t changing the neighborhood!”
Expertly paced, eminently readable, and a promising start.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4695-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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