Zimler is particularly good on the devastation of grief and how families weave personal genealogies into larger histories.
Editorial Reviews. Review. "A rising star who creates tantalizing tales." About the Author. Emma Hunting Midnight (Upyr) - Kindle edition by Emma Holly. Courting Midnight (The Upyr Series, Book 5) (Berkley Sensation) [Emma Holly] on bahana-line.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The world's oldest living.
It is only years later, after John's own marriage, that he begins to understand the emotional dynamic that was unfolding in his family in the years leading up to Midnight's "disappearance", and so learns that his great friend and mentor is still alive. The search for Midnight takes up the rest of the novel. The action moves to America, where Midnight has been sold into slavery, and is told through the dual voices of his slave daughter on a plantation and John, desperate to find him.
It is almost another book. Even the rhythm of the writing changes, speeding up into a page-turning story of cruelty, conspiracy, hunting and escape, plot-driven in a way that makes you read more greedily, eager to get to the end. But there is a price to be paid for adrenaline, and the faster you devour it, the more the book seems to lose the quieter, deeper pleasures of character and culture, which until this point Zimler has been so adept at exploring.
Part of the problem is that slavery narratives, like Holocaust stories, carry risk. Looking for More Great Reads?
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We are experiencing technical difficulties. His greatest intellectual love is for the hidden Jews of Portugal, forcibly converted to Christianity by King Manuel in John Zarco Stewart half-Jewish, half-Scottish is a descendant of the narrator of Zimler's previous novel, The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, a detective story set at the time of the massacre of Lisbon's Jews.
In that novel, Berekiah Zarco, a writer of manuscripts, investigates the murder of his uncle, Abraham. At first, it is disappointing that the tone of John's narration seems so similar to Berekiah's.
It is as if Zimler has decided simply to re-use the winning formula of The Last Kabbalist, and set it three centuries later. But nothing could be further from the truth. This is a far darker and more complex tale, as the child narrator grows into adolescence and manhood.