Engrossing, intricately embroidered, and refreshingly original.
In this novel by Anonymous an educator in Washington, D.C., stumbles into a strange world that promises to reveal literary secrets.
As this story opens, the poet Walt Whitman is saying a final farewell to his beloved Rock Creek in the nation’s capital. It’s the summer of 1864, and Walt has spent the past few years of the Civil War comforting the sick and dying in Washington’s Armory Square Hospital. Walt, who’s emotionally broken and largely unknown at this point in his career, stumbles upon Ezra, a former slave, and June, a high society girl, who live together in the wilderness as a two-person “army of poetry lovers.” They claim to communicate with the spirit of the poet John Keats, who, they say, lives in Ezra’s soul, and they pledge to make sure that Walt is remembered as a great poet. The novel jumps to the present day to introduce narrator Jack, a community college teacher and aficionado of Keats’ work who finds himself broke and sitting in Rock Creek Park. There, he encounters an enigmatic stranger known as “Cowboy” who, along with his gang, claims to protect a “secret world” in the woods that Walt created. As Jack is led further into Cowboy’s esoteric community, its mystery is slowly revealed, which makes for compelling reading—particularly in how it forges a link to Ezra and June’s story. The novel is effectively a playground for philosophical conversation, and the author carefully and convincingly captures Whitman’s sensibilities as both a flâneur and a transcendentalist: “My undistracted spirit could pour itself into any living miracle I came upon. I could inhabit ordinary working people, the pit of a peach, a powerful sunrise—anything.” The novel is also steeped in literary history, as when it refers to Richard Brautigan’s 1968 novel, In Watermelon Sugar, in which “people lived in quaint, little shacks in a mind-bending forest full of magical creeks,” offering a distorted reflection of Cowboy’s own perception of Rock Creek Park. Readers with a limited knowledge of poetry, particularly that of Whitman and Keats, may struggle to engage with this book, but others will find it an enjoyably weird and imaginative literary journey.
Engrossing, intricately embroidered, and refreshingly original.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Oakwood Terrace Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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