Over the top, but many readers will go wild for this gospel-spouting, life-affirming story.
From beginning to end, the Lord is the most significant character in this determined, lively novel, a spiritually confident first collaboration between music author Ritz (Howling at the Moon, 2003, etc.) and R&B-singer-turned-minister John.
Albertina Merci is a former blues backup singer now in her 70s. As a “minister without a sanctuary” in Los Angeles, she studies her Bible every day and doesn’t hesitate to impart the Word to her friends as she sees fit. Justine comes over to Albertina’s house every morning to watch Maggie’s World, an Oprah-like program hosted by glamorous ex-athlete, model and unstoppable businesswoman Maggie Clay. But suddenly the show is on the skids: Maggie is descending into manic depression, and her producer, Albertina’s Yale-educated niece Cindy, has stage IV ovarian cancer. When Cindy asks her aunt to come back to Dallas and minister to her, Albertina is reluctant. Her hometown brings back memories of prejudice and pain: As a young girl, she was arrested at Neiman Marcus for touching the furs, and a store detective broke her jaw. But Albertina is an instrument of God, and she knows she is needed at Cindy’s side. After her niece dies, Albertina focuses on Maggie. Having witnessed as a kid her mother’s duping by ministers, Maggie is skeptical of Albertina’s religion and in her manic state even attacks her as a sanctimonious hypocrite. While the two wrangle, Albertina attends to other souls in need, including an estranged married couple and a father who rejects his gay son who is dying of AIDS.
Over the top, but many readers will go wild for this gospel-spouting, life-affirming story.Pub Date: June 13, 2006
ISBN: 0-7679-2165-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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