An impressive novel full of action, politics, and emotion.
In Borgos’ (Holding Fire, 2016) novel, a man travels to war-torn South Sudan in search of a cancer patient’s biological daughter.
Freelance journalist Archimedes “Archie” Reese has flown home from a job in Washington, D.C., to Boise, Idaho, to visit his mother. While there, he gets an unexpected request from her friend Annie Brody, who’s suffering from leukemia. The cancer treatments haven’t been successful, and she needs to find her daughter in order to get a stem-cell transplant. Unfortunately, she gave up the girl for adoption about 30 years ago and doesn’t even know her name. However, in a bizarre twist, Annie unknowingly chose her biological daughter to be an egg donor years later. Genetic testing of Annie’s son proves this, and with this knowledge and a college track-team photo, Archie manages to find out where Annie’s daughter is. Her name is Beka Halpern, and she’s currently running a USAID camp in South Sudan. Archie flies to Brussels and then South Sudan to track Beka down at Camp Tanping. Although she’s initially unaware of the real reason for Archie’s visit (he wants to break it to her slowly), she allows him to stay at the camp, and she and Archie quickly grow close. It comes to light that a corrupt local politician has been stealing the camp’s supplies, and it’s up to Beka and her driver, Suleyman Elbasha, “a human GPS in a land that Google Earth had not figured out,” to ward off the threat. Meanwhile, the entire country moves toward chaos, and Annie’s life hangs in the balance back home. Borgos’ exciting story manages to capture the heaviness, wonder, and danger of Africa in a smoothly written narrative. It’s full of well-drawn characters, and Borgos provides them with backstories that easily explain their capabilities. There are some unlikely scenarios in this novel; the egg-donor twist, for instance, is particularly bizarre. Still, the author makes them plausible while also telling the story of the ill-fated camp and its swelling population. In scenes with the aforementioned villain, Borgos also deftly illustrates the novel’s larger thematic point: that foreign aid enriches the few while many other people starve.
An impressive novel full of action, politics, and emotion.Pub Date: May 5, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 325
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2018
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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