Heartbreak, history and hope combine in this atmospheric novel.
In Friedman’s debut work of historical fiction, a Jewish family flees persecution in Russia and makes a new life in New York City in the early 1900s.
The Raisky family—father Meyer, mother Sadie, and daughter Miriam—goes on the run after a pogrom targets the Jewish community in Kishinev, Russia. They pay a smuggler to help them escape the country and secure passage across the Atlantic to the United States, where Sadie’s sister had previously settled. In New York City’s Lower East Side, they discover that life as an immigrant in America is much harder than they had imagined. Teenage daughter Miriam drops out of school to get a job at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory to help make ends meet. Long hours, low pay, and dangerous work conditions motivate her to join an effort to unionize the city’s shirtwaist companies, and she meets a handsome young labor organizer named Jacob. She also makes friends with girls from the factory, who join the union effort. The author effectively harks back to the government inaction during the Russian pogroms as the New York police and local politicians stand by as hired thugs beat up the union organizers. However, the union members’ worst fears about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory are realized in a horrifying tragedy. Overall, this work of historical fiction is impeccably researched and told with great heart, and as a result, it manages to bring an important era in history to life. Friedman describes New York during this time in great detail, describing bustling streetscapes and providing readers with a compelling sense of what living in cramped, squalid tenement apartments was really like—freezing in winter, scorching in summer, with paper-thin walls and little privacy.
Heartbreak, history and hope combine in this atmospheric novel.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4787-6947-7
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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