A gripping historical saga that skillfully addresses the trauma of the Holocaust.
A Jewish family torn apart by Nazi and Soviet persecution struggles to reconnect in this historical novel.
Sanders’ tale braids together two different timelines. One, set in the mid-1970s, follows Sarah Byrne, a 24-year-old market researcher in Chicago who wants to find out more information about her mother Ilana’s mysterious past after her sudden death. To that end, Sarah approaches her maternal grandmother, Miriam—a prickly, suspicious elderly woman who initially refuses to talk to her, but grudgingly relents as Sarah plies her with home-cooked meals. Intertwining chapters follow the ordeal of Miriam and her Jewish family—husband Max, a prosperous dentist; young Ilana; and toddler son, Monya—in the Latvian capital of Riga during World War II. When the Soviets invade Latvia in 1940, the family’s house, money, and belongings are confiscated; things worsen a year later, when the Germans conquer the country. After a horrific tragedy, Miriam makes the wrenching decision to give Ilana and Monya away to her Lutheran maid, Gutte, who will conceal their Jewish identities and raise them as gentiles. Miriam endures intense horrors during the Holocaust, surviving due to her own grit, luck, and the occasional kindness of strangers. In the ’70s timeline, Sarah travels to the Soviet republic of Latvia to try to track down a family member; she has an unlikely romance but also experiences totalitarian terror herself when the KGB targets her. Sanders’ novel vividly recreates the nerve-wracking fear and carnage of wartime Riga, as well as the city’s feeling of grim paranoia during the late Soviet period. Her evocative prose reveals nuances of character in mundane domestic details (“Her grandmother dug through the meat loaf with her fork as if she were looking for buried treasure, or poison”) and bears witness to atrocities in a manner that’s all the more moving for its restraint and realism, as in a passage set just before a synagogue is burned: “The rabbi…began chanting the Shema in Hebrew, traditional last words for Jews, in a loud, unwavering voice. He walked into the synagogue. The doors clanged shut behind him.” The result is a searching exploration of how much is lost during tragedies, even by those who live on.
A gripping historical saga that skillfully addresses the trauma of the Holocaust.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-0063247895
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.
A retelling of Pinocchio from Geppetto's point of view.
The novel purports to be the memoirs of Geppetto, a carpenter from the town of Collodi, written in the belly of a vast fish that has swallowed him. Fortunately for Geppetto, the fish has also engulfed a ship, and its supplies—fresh water, candles, hardtack, captain’s logbook, ink—are what keep the Swallowed Man going. (Collodi is, of course, the name of the author of the original Pinocchio.) A misfit whose loneliness is equaled only by his drive to make art, Geppetto scours his surroundings for supplies, crafting sculptures out of pieces of the ship’s wood, softened hardtack, mussel shells, and his own hair, half hoping and half fearing to create a companion once again that will come to life. He befriends a crab that lives all too briefly in his beard, then mourns when “she” dies. Alone in the dark, he broods over his past, reflecting on his strained relationship with his father and his harsh treatment of his own “son”—Pinocchio, the wooden puppet that somehow came to life. In true Carey fashion, the author illustrates the novel with his own images of his protagonist’s art: sketches of Pinocchio, of woodworking tools, of the women Geppetto loved; photos of driftwood, of tintypes, of a sculpted self-portrait with seaweed hair. For all its humor, the novel is dark and claustrophobic, and its true subject is the responsibilities of creators. Remembering the first time he heard of the sea monster that was to swallow him, Geppetto wonders if the monster is somehow connected to Pinocchio: “The unnatural child had so thrown the world off-balance that it must be righted at any cost, and perhaps the only thing with the power to right it was a gigantic sea monster, born—I began to suppose this—just after I cracked the world by making a wooden person.” Later, contemplating his self-portrait bust, Geppetto asks, “Monster of the deep. Am I, then, the monster? Do I nightmare myself?”
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18887-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
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