A sometimes gloomy experience in the lives of despondent characters but undeniably provocative and all-consuming.
In debut novelist Stafford’s searing drama, AA meeting attendees find their lives have strange past and ongoing connections.
Jonathan Vacarie drives his mother, Bea, to the AA meeting being held at the Our Lady of Perpetual Forgiveness church in Tartusville, Connecticut. Jonathan is a recovering alcoholic and thinks that AA could also do his mother some good, but most other attendees, it seems, are truly anonymous. They include Officer Joe Batina, tree worker “King Karl” Warth, newcomer Nellie and businessman Eddie Musso, who’s only there as part of his probation for a DWI. Some have already met; some will soon cross paths; and others will reunite later in surprising, occasionally deadly, ways. The novel sometimes reads like a well-constructed short story collection. For example, a line that Bea yells in the church parking lot is repeated in later chapters, making a couple of small jumps back in time (not to mention shifting perspectives) hardly noticeable. Each character has his or her own back story: Eddie, a family man, can’t stay away from bartender Sandra, who’s not his wife; Karl desperately tries to show his estranged teenaged son, Marcus, that he’s a changed man. The varying perspectives afford multiple views of the cast. In Jonathan’s story, for instance, he exudes sympathy, especially due to his beloved dog, Zella, who’s dying (he believes) from cancer. But in the eyes of other AA attendees, he’s a sad, pitiful figure, often sitting next to his loud, abrasive and generally despised mother. Karl, whose “old mind” harbors very dark thoughts, is attempting to better himself. The novel is not for the faint of heart; things do eventually become grim and violent. The ending, however, which is likewise bleak, will reverberate for days after reading.
A sometimes gloomy experience in the lives of despondent characters but undeniably provocative and all-consuming.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 329
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2014
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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