A skillful tale of an American’s trauma and expatriation.
A young Iraq War veteran tries to escape his past in Perry’s (More Beautiful Women, 2015, etc.) latest novel.
In 2008, 26-year-old Jesse McCallister is fresh from the battlefields of Iraq. Rather than returning to the Army for an ordered third tour, Jesse takes his share of the proceeds from the sale of his dead parents’ land and flees his native Texas for Europe. “He’d just wanted to go,” Perry writes, “and watch the flat horizons of the Iraqi desert and North Texas recede in his rear-view mirror.” In Switzerland, Jesse falls in love with a beautiful Italian waitress named Sonya and falls in with a crowd centered around a wealthy young American named Michael Barnes. Barnes helps Jesse acquire a new passport, literally and figuratively giving him the opportunity to choose a new identity for himself. Jesse and Sonya soon marry, and the newly formed group of friends wanders down to the French Riviera. While the immediate moment is filled with pleasure, Jesse can’t escape the traumas of combat in Ramadi. And Jesse is not the only one of these young people with a past to escape. The present itself becomes more troubled, as the group migrates to Côte d’Ivoire in Africa with charitable intentions. The dialogue in the novel is often less than believable—Jesse picks up Sonya with the line “You look like a pretty actress. Like someone in the movies.” Much more strongly developed is Jesse’s interior life. Perry deftly draws Jesse’s memories into the present. The novel resembles the post–World War I Lost Generation works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, most notably the latter’s The Sun Also Rises (which also features a character named Barnes). Aside from the appearance of modern elements like cellphones and credit cards, this story could almost take place 80 years earlier. The author effectively builds on his historical model while making it relevant to the key events of the contemporary era, such as the 2008 financial crisis and the Iraq War.
A skillful tale of an American’s trauma and expatriation.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 265
Publisher: Web Dispatches Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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