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Secret father
Record details
- ISBN: 9780618152841
- ISBN: 0618152849
-
Physical Description:
print
344 p. ; 24 cm. - Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin, c2003.
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| Genre: | Historical fiction. Domestic fiction. |
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- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2003 June #1
Carroll, author of the best-selling memoir An American Requiem (1996), returns to fiction with a cold war coming-of-age tale that captures both the particular tensions of the era and the universal yearnings of the young. Michael Montgomery is a 15-year-old American boy living in Frankfurt with his business executive father. A polio victim, Michael chafes under the restraint of both leg braces and his father's overprotective care (his mother's recent death is a constant source of unspoken grief between father and son). What better way for Michael to taste a little freedom than a verboten road trip to Berlin with his American school friends Katherine and Rick. Youthful rebellion turns serious when the teens are detained crossing into East Berlin (the Wall is days away from being erected). With an international incident threatened if Rick's stepfather's secret service connections are revealed, Michael's father and Rick's German mother rush to Berlin to intercede. There's much more to it than that, of course, and Carroll, telling the story in flashback through alternating narrators, ratchets the tension nicely while vividly evoking the cold war atmosphere and effectively contrasting the teens' naivete with the East Germans' realpolitik. Carroll's weakness for melodrama, apparent in his earlier novels, is noticeable here, too, especially in the personal relationships, but his page-turning readability provide satisfactory compensation. Entertaining popular fiction. ((Reviewed June 1 & 15, 2003)) Copyright 2003 Booklist Reviews - BookPage Reviews : BookPage Reviews 2003 August
Entangled by Cold War secretsSuspense, history, literary fiction, espionage, romance and psychological dramaâSecret Father, the compelling new novel by acclaimed writer James Carroll, is all of this and more.
Told by father and son, the story is set in Germany during the summer of 1961. The Cold War between East and West is escalating, and construction will soon begin on the Berlin Wall. During this tense time, Ulrich, Michael and Katharine leave their American high school in West Germany and travel, without telling their parents, to the Communist side of Berlin for the May Day celebration.
Their escapade springs from youthful rebellion but quickly brings serious consequences. Shadowed by his unknown birth father's past, Ulrich has taken a flight bag belonging to his stepfather, a U.S. intelligence officer. The bagâwhat it contains, who will view its secrets and what will happen to Ulrich for possessing itâis at the crux of the story.
The teenagers are detained by the Stasi, East Germany's notorious secret police. Paul, Michael's widower father, and Charlotte, Ulrich's beautiful German-born mother, must attempt to rescue them before their actions cause an international incident that could destroy them and the world's tenuous peace.
Secret Father, Carroll's first novel in nine years, is being published this month on the 42nd anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall. The author of Constantine's Sword, which examined the role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust, and An American Requiem, a National Book Award-winning memoir, Carroll himself spent time in Germany in the 1960s as the son of a U.S. general. In fact, Carroll and two friends took a trip to East Germany, but their experiences were less harrowing than those of the fictional characters in the novel.
Gripping and beautifully written, Secret Father is a remarkable evocation of a tumultuous era and of the power that secrets can hold across generations.
Cindy Kershner is a writer in Nashville. Copyright 2003 BookPage Reviews
- Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2003 June #1
It's 1961, and three high-school friends cut class to attend the May Day rally in East Berlin in the last tense days before the wall goes up.Set apart from their classmates by their seriousness and their intelligence, Ulrich Neuhaus, Michael Montgomery, and Katherine "Kit" Carson come from complicated backgrounds. Leipzig-born Ulrich's stepfather is an Air Force general and a spook. His mother Charlotte is an aristocrat haunted by her wartime marriage to Ulrich's father. Kit, a fledgling writer, has an abusive sergeant for a father, an accommodating southern mother, and secret plans to attend Ole Miss. Michael, crippled by polio, lives alone with his overprotective banker father Paul, who blames himself for the accidental death of Michael's mother. It is the politically studious Ulrich who proposes the disastrous trip that is at the center of Carroll's somber and evocative look at some of the most frightening times in one of the most frightening places in the Cold War. Keen to pass through the only opening in the Iron Curtain for a look at the country his mother and he fled, Ulrich enlists Michael (who has his father's car for the week) and Kit (who may be sweet on him) to pose as a debating team headed for a match in West Berlin. On their harrowing trip in the sealed shuttle train from the free West to the island city, eastern guards discover a roll of film in the gym bag Ulrich "borrowed" from his high-ranking stepfather, and the trip begins to go disastrously awry. The three think they've fast-talked their way out of trouble, but once they cross into the eastern zone they are scooped up by the authorities. Paul and Charlotte, meanwhile, have used their connections to trace the students and begin their own harrowing trip to retrieve them. Novelist and memoirist Carroll, whose 2001 Constantine's Sword was a bestselling analysis of the Roman Catholic Church's dealings with the Reich, makes excellent use of his firsthand knowledge of the territory, stumbling only slightly on the romances.Fine period thriller.Author tour Copyright Kirkus 2003 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews July #1
In his first novel in nine years, Carroll, whose Mortal Friends and Prince of Peace brought him many ardent readers, focuses on a single weekend in 1961, just before the Berlin Wall created an impenetrable barrier between East and West. On an idealistic lark, three American high school students travel to the Communist side of Berlin for the May Day parade. Ensnared by the East Germans for alleged currency violations, they are clapped in jail. Meanwhile, their frantic parents mobilize, with two of them traveling to Berlin to pluck the kids loose. Surprisingly, this generic plot supports a beautifully textured exploration of relationships between husbands and wives, parents and sons, friends and lovers. Love, in its harsh and dreadful facets, is portrayed as a powerful force, capable of fusing hearts but also of destroying them. A wonderful bonus is Carroll's re-creation of the 1961 atmosphere and the tense facts of the Cold War in Berlin. The taut drama of history, interlaced with the emotional sagas of these marvelously drawn figures, makes for a very satisfying narrative. Highly recommended for most collections.-Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2003 June #5
The heart of this fine novel, Carroll's first in nine years, is spelled out in the book's epigraph, a line from Dostoyevski: "Real love, compared to fantasy, is a harsh and dreadful thing." Seventeen-year-old Michael Montgomery, crippled by polio, lives with his banker father, Paul, in Frankfurt, Germany. Ulrich "Rick" Healy is Michael's rebellious best friend, son of an American general, David Healy, and his German wife, Charlotte. Katharine "Kit" Carson is Rick's girlfriend, also an army brat. The year is 1961 and all three attend the American high school in Wiesbaden. Rick, a budding socialist and leader of the three, decides they should cut school and travel to Berlin to attend the great May Day parade in the Eastern sector. The trip begins as a lark, but descends into chaos after their capture by East German police on trumped up currency-fraud charges. Paul and Charlotte race to Berlin to rescue their children, unaware that Rick is carrying a secret roll of film that if discovered could ignite World War III. Carroll writes with rich, lyrical ease: "Clusters of spring flowers in every color wore the beads of the recent rain like a dust of glass." His characters are richly drawn, and the pieces of his impeccably paced story fit together with the cool precision of a Mercedes-Benz. He plays the cards of his plot perfectly, each new element a revelation, leaving the reader hungrily turning the pages until the riveting story is told and the lesson is learned, that real love is indeed a harsh and dreadful thing. A few electrifying days prove enough to transform the lives of these fascinating characters-and the world-forever. (Aug.) Forecast: Carroll's recent history of the Catholic Church and the Jews, Constantine's Sword, was a bestseller; his memoir, An American Requiem, won the National Book Award. The release of his first novel in nearly a decade will be a publishing event. Author tour. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
