A sensitive portrayal of a sensitive spirit facing challenges in a complex era.
A shy young Jewish boy growing up in mid-20th-century New York City experiences feelings of inadequacy and alienation at a boys summer camp in Steinberg’s debut novel.
Ten-year-old Albie Greenberg enjoys using his father’s binoculars to observe people from a distance from his apartment window. The boy feels very much apart from others, in part due to a “sense of strangeness” that permeates his family. He’s a sensitive and introverted child who seeks refuge in books and dreams from a world in which he doesn’t seem to fit. When his parents enthusiastically announce that he’ll be going away to Bear Lake sports camp for the summer, he understands instinctively that the vigorous atmosphere of male athletics won’t be for him. Once there, he immediately becomes the target of bullying from other boys and from counselors who punish disobedience and vulnerability with painful “noogies.” Albie finds his only friends among a handful of other “unwelcome and inept” boys. The atmosphere of danger only increases when the camp is placed under quarantine for polio. Albie finds that there’s a darkness in him as well as fantasies of escape. In re-creating Albie’s inner conflict, Steinberg’s narrative skillfully evokes the postwar trauma and denial that characterized 1950s America. For example, his immigrant father’s hearty attempts to assimilate into American culture seem to be part of an effort to put an ominous past behind him; the author also shows the effects of trauma on Albie’s uncle and grandparents and how his mother only cultivates a brittle optimism with the aid of regular purchases at the liquor store. The camp is a particularly vivid microcosm of a larger society that’s torn between dark fears and bluff arrogance. A brief flash-forward scene in which an older Albie visits relatives in Zurich feels more like a tantalizing distraction than a satisfying revelation. Overall, though, the novel is a realistic and affecting examination of the effects of societal pressure.
A sensitive portrayal of a sensitive spirit facing challenges in a complex era.Pub Date: March 31, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73602-860-5
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Forsesi Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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