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Title: Children of Pithiviers by Sheila Kohler ISBN: 1-58195-032-2 Publisher: Zoland Books Pub. Date: 01 June, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.4 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A brave, powerful book
Comment: This book is a complex and chilling investigation of the darkest human impulses. The writing is exquisite, but more importantly, Kohler makes us ask ourselves the hard questions--which is how I define moral fiction. I can't imagine it was Kohler's intention to put the seduction of Deirdre on a scale with the tragedy of the children of Pithiviers, but rather, to make us look at the nature of corruption and compliance, to force us to look in the scary places--and this she has done brilliantly.
Rating: 3
Summary: Not as deep as it seems
Comment: I read this after Cracks, Kohler's earlier novel, and felt a similar disappointment with each. Kohler is good with creating an atmosphere where a hidden, horrible truth seems to lurk just outside the field of vision. Unfortunately, the truth here is predictable and lacks impact. Dodo, the 18 year old protagonist, floats passively and naively through the events of the novel, while the reader can see the other characters' machinations a mile away. I actually found the hidden-children plot auxilliary. The real story is Dodo's relationship with the de C's and their seductive duplicity. The Vichy France revelation was just one more example of this, not the central event of the book, in my opinion. Ultimately, I felt Kohler had all the elements of an evocative novel, including skilled prose, but that they didn't add up to much. I finished it quickly, unmoved and unsatisfied.
Rating: 1
Summary: Disappointment
Comment: A previous reviewer pointed to the main disappointment with this book - you expect from the title that it will center around Jewish children in France during WWII. Instead, it centers around "Dodo's" sexual awakening - at the hands of a sixty something pedophile. I found the story inconsistent, at best, as Deidre vacillated between admiring her hosts and feeling victimized by them. Unfortunately, because the character of Deidre was so underdeveloped, we saw no evidence that this vacillation was part of her coming of age, a reaction to what happened in Paris, or that it related at all to her character. Deidre is a flat, lifeless character who is unworthy of her main character status. I just could not take the leap of faith Kohler asked me to take, and believe that Deidre would discover the sexual abuse that the Monsieur was committing with Anna and Lea, and then still sleep with him again.
I could go on and on about my disappointments with this book. In a nutshell, I found the characters to be poorly developed and inconsistent. The story is simply not compelling. I regret taking the time to read it.
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Title: Stories From Another World by Sheila Kohler ISBN: 0865381100 Publisher: Ontario Review Pr Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Cracks by Sheila Kohler ISBN: 1581950268 Publisher: Zoland Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Distant Echo by Val McDermid ISBN: 0312301995 Publisher: St. Martin's Minotaur Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal: A Novel by Zoe Heller ISBN: 0805073337 Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title: Elizabeth Costello by J. M. Coetzee ISBN: 0670031305 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 09 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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