A vivid narrative of faith, but, by its very nature, limited in scope and appeal.
Israeli novelist Sabato (Aleppo Tales, 2004, etc.) portrays a simple man living an uneventful life of piety.
Ezra Siman Tov’s twilight years are explicated in chapters that combine small stories, parables and religious text with tedious lists of the day’s routines, most of which are devoted to religious practice. Ezra works in a laundry, but his life is devoted to God. He spends every spare moment at the synagogue or in private prayer, reciting psalms or studying ethical teachings. Although he honors his wife and children, this is a story of a man and his maker, not a man and his family. Ezra is praised by the good people of Jerusalem for his kindness, and indeed the stories he is famous for are all tales of the joy he derives from worship. The city’s Great Writer is his friend and comes to depend on him for narrative inspiration. Ezra’s brother-in-law, Dr. Tawil, a pompous scholar of medieval verse, is eventually humbled by Ezra’s wisdom. Yeshiva student Moishe Dovid, who is in the habit of chastising the uneducated Ezra, begins to see the worth of his genuine, undecorated piety. The pleasure Ezra enjoys from living in the sheltering faith of God is acknowledged by all, but will change as the city begins to chip away at the things he loves. When the laundry must close to make way for a broader street and a shopping center, Ezra feels that at last he will have enough time to study the Torah in depth. Then his beloved rabbi and mentor dies. Services are discontinued at his synagogue; classes are canceled at another to make way for more contemporary ideas. An office building is raised next to his apartment, blocking the sunlight to his once-flowering veranda. The old way of life, Ezra’s Jerusalem of tireless devotion, is being brushed aside by a more secular modernity.
A vivid narrative of faith, but, by its very nature, limited in scope and appeal.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-59264-140-7
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Toby Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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