An engaging and exhaustive look at Zionism and Judaism through a fictional lens.
A Jewish family explores their faith in Gale’s novel.
Patriarch Rabbi Levin, the head of the Rodef Tzedek synagogue in New York City, prepares for a Kristallnacht observance and, later, a seder. His son, Greg, is studying German and is visiting concentration camps in Germany while living in Berlin. Rabbi Levin’s daughter Bracha’s journey is explored in more detail as she studies Arabic in Israel and confronts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict head-on. There is not much of a conventional plot; the story simply observes the Levin family as they navigate the intersection of their faith with real-world issues, such as Bracha’s fight for the rights of Palestinians even as she is surrounded by advocates of Zionism and discussing nationalism with the friends she meets in Israel. Rabbi Levin oversees bat mitzvahs in Manhattan and attempts to get the synagogue involved in “social action projects.” Later, Rabbi Levin and his wife, Tova, travel to Israel to visit Bracha. The novel feels thoroughly researched, and the author makes a concerted effort to showcase the varying opinions regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, the author’s tendency to meticulously contextualize nearly every conversation between the characters with historical information and exposition often leads to dialogue that, while informative, reads as cluttered and unrealistic. For example, when Rabbi Levin is speaking to a friend, he says, “In 1954, in the landmark case of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, the Supreme Court ruled that separate was inherently unequal…Through white flight, red-lining, blockbusting, and gentrification, also known as urban renewal…” These are important issues to examine through fiction, but the execution could flow better and feel less like the characters are speaking in formal essays. Another (albeit smaller) problem is the shifting chronology, which can be a bit confusing. Despite these issues, Gale’s story is worthy and takes great pains to explore Judaism and Zionism in a comprehensive and honest way.
An engaging and exhaustive look at Zionism and Judaism through a fictional lens.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9798887937595
Page Count: 418
Publisher: Page Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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