Barenbaum has an eye for visual detail, but her story bogs down in sentiment, overplotting, and lecturing.
A young Jewish physicist in 1914 Russia wants to photograph a solar eclipse to prove Einstein’s theory of relativity while his sister, a doctor, struggles to ensure their survival.
Readers not steeped in physics may not be aware that a British astronomer proved Einstein’s theory after a 1919 solar eclipse. In Barenbaum’s first novel, a historical thriller about physics and the travail of Russian Jews, fictional physicist Vanya lives with his sister, Miri, and their grandmother Baba in Kovno, where anti-Semitic violence erupts regularly. Vanya has been promised a position at Harvard and a life in America for his family if he can prove Einstein’s theory with equations and photos of the coming eclipse. On the eve of war, Miri’s fiance, Yuri, secretly agrees to enlist for military duty in exchange for Miri’s promotion to surgeon at the hospital where he’s trained her. To escape an influential university colleague itching to appropriate his research, Vanya also enlists, heading off with Yuri to Riga, where he hopes to join an American physicist bringing the necessary camera to photograph the eclipse. Meanwhile, as the noose tightens around the Jewish community in Kovno, Mira and Baba escape with the help of Sasha, a Jewish soldier Miri has met under harrowing circumstances. Baba heads to St. Petersburg while Miri and Sasha set off to find Yuri and Vanya. Unbeknownst to Miri, the two have left Riga searching for the elusive American. The siblings separately face multiplying crises that begin to run together—several train incidents, several knife incidents, etc. Vanya unexpectedly bonds with Yuri while Miri, no surprise, is inescapably drawn to passionate, valiant Sasha. Too bad for her because Yuri’s careful self-control is misleading. In fact, while Miri and Vanya are annoyingly gifted as well as earnestly moral and Miri’s darling Sasha is typically dashing and heroic, Yuri evolves into Barenbaum’s one fully developed character, heartbreakingly full of human contradictions.
Barenbaum has an eye for visual detail, but her story bogs down in sentiment, overplotting, and lecturing.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-4627-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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