A shimmeringly delicate invention. Cool and spare, the third-person narrative zigzags through time, accumulating authenticity and power. It is hard to stop reading ... Cunning.
Deeply upsetting in places, particularly when we hear of the brutal exploits of camp commander Rudolf Höss and his equally sadistic henchmen. Tuck deserves credit for not softening the blows and diluting the atrocities ... The nonlinear narrative darts backward and forward, and routinely fragments into a series of vignettes comprising meditations, profiles and potted histories, many of which chronicle the tragic plights of other characters ... Could have been a crude drama, fashioned from a stolen identity. Instead, Tuck has sensitively and skillfully created a memorial to a life cut short while shining necessary light on the darkest chapter of the 20th century.
The challenge is that when the facts are so heavy, any attempt to fictionalize them, to enter imaginatively into the lives of people living through things that are unimaginable, can feel like a violation. Yet without access to imaginative sympathies, what’s the point of writing a novel about them? Tuck’s solution is to furnish Czeslawa’s life as sparsely as possible ... It’s a deeply impressive achievement from a wonderful writer and loses none of its power from the fact that the ground has been well covered.
A gifted author ... Tuck creates masterful images of her real-life teenaged protagonist ... A relatively short novel that is packed with knowledge, memories, and hardship. And while historical fiction and memoirs do not require it, Tuck provides page references. Her depth of research and attention to detail is superb.
Tuck also attempts to illuminate the particular life of the girl and her family with textural, novelistic details ... In these factual sections, Tuck’s voice is sober and unadorned, befitting the overwhelming horror of the subject matter. Set beside the naturalistic fictions, they shock, particularly when Tuck leaps associatively between the two modes. A short description of how the ashes and excrement of the Auschwitz prisoners were dumped into the Vistula and Sola Rivers is immediately followed by a discussion between two girls about swimming—a disturbing evocation of the domestic in the demonic. Tuck denies us the comforts of the novel, refusing to quarantine the real at a safe distance from the fictional. She demands that we consider them side by side, two expressions of the same material ... The author stumbles ... The more solidly Tuck draws the world around her protagonist, the more uncertain the writer’s picture of her becomes.
Narrated as a formal composite of fiction and nonfiction. Tuck imagines snippets and fragments from Czesława’s life, and combines them with historical facts. The effect is bluntly descriptive ... The brevity of these descriptions, along with their deliberate pacing, makes certain images and observations stand out in stronger relief ... The spareness of the prose and the brutishness of the endings of each section evoke the spareness and brutality of Czesława’s too-short life.
Striking and sometimes frustrating ... It’s disappointing that Tuck, with all her evocative gifts, makes the trauma of what Germany did across Eastern Europe during World War II less rather than more precise.
Tuck intersperses Czeslawa’s haunting narrative with varied historical accounts and figures, holding a resolute eye on the atrocities of the time and the lives cut short.
Haunting ... Extensively annotated and researched, Tuck’s brief novel returns, time and time again, to the subject of memories, a theme alluded to in an epigraph consisting of a fragment of a Louise Glück poem. The author's skillful blending of facts and fiction reanimates the memory of one of the countless lost children of the Holocaust. A painful, essential, unflinching memento.
Unflinching ... With graphic imagery and lyrical prose, Tuck vividly evokes Czeslawa’s innocence and resilience, as she tries to hold out hope by imagining Anton in Auschwitz with her. It’s an unforgettable portrait of buoyant youth in the grimmest of places.
