An entertaining, nuanced novel set among the world of Bigfoot hunters.
A trio of Bigfoot hunters scours the Olympic Peninsula for cryptids and redemption in this new literary novel from Rau (Caveman at the End of the World, 2017, etc.).
Louis Price and Lydia Swane arrive at the Olympic Museum of Cryptozoological Studies to see its new exhibit: a supposedly authentic Bigfoot. Lydia, who has been searching for Bigfoot for four decades, isn’t impressed: The museum curator won’t tell her the origin of the already taxidermic specimen, nor will he let her take a hair sample or even a photograph. It’s just another disappointment that makes Lydia, who has recently lost her husband and partner, question if Bigfoot is even out there. “The whole world has changed since I started doing this: now, everyone’s got a high resolution camera in their pocket all the time,” she tells Louis. “In spite of that, instead of seeing more, better quality images of Bigfoot, as one would expect, we’re seeing fewer.” Louis is a believer, but he hasn’t been completely honest about why he asked to tag along on Lydia’s trip. A frequent guest on a right-wing talk show, he has been having his own doubts about his life choices (as well as panic attacks). The unlikely pair set off on a trip around Washington’s remote Olympic Peninsula on a last-ditch attempt to locate proof of America’s great cryptid. When they meet Clyde Whitethunder, a giant man and fellow seeker, the trio finds that together they might uncover answers to questions they haven’t even asked. Rau’s writing is moody and lean, presenting a haunted, melancholy portrait of the peninsula and its denizens: “Everything up here, to Louis’s eyes, seemed somehow temporary. Maybe it was the emptiness of the streets….Maybe it was the fact that the sky had devoured the mountains behind the town and seemed so hungry to eat up anything else it could.” Despite the goofiness of the premise, Rau takes his characters and their search seriously, digging past the footprints and blurry photos to find the broken lives underneath. The author manages to sneak some satisfying twists into the plot—and not of the type that the reader probably expects.
An entertaining, nuanced novel set among the world of Bigfoot hunters.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-578-55390-0
Page Count: 195
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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