Heartbreaking, occasionally humorous, and powerful, with an ending not really satisfying but certainly lingering.
Short story writer Perlman debuts his first novel, a beautifully written, complex intergenerational drama that examines the ways family relationships shift when trust is broken.
Helen, Georgia, a small, upscale mountain town, is the setting for a Christmas/New Year’s gathering of the daughters (Sammy, Rachel, and Lottie), sons-in-law, and grandchildren of Julianne “Jules” Talmadge Beasley Lipscomb, family matriarch. Jules has been married to Harvey Lipscomb for 10 years, and he has taken her family as his own. But Harvey, a professor of gender and sexuality, has entered the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and he has been carrying a secret about his past that he knows he must share with Julianne before he can no longer remember it. His is not the only, nor the worst, secret that will rock the family. Perlman’s roots as an author of short stories are reflected in the structure of his novel. Divided into six chapters, the story of Jules and her family is told from different perspectives. In the third chapter, Perlman switches the voice from narrator to first person, temporarily handing the story over to Cliff, Sammy’s husband. Then, in the last third of the novel, as readers are settled in for the duration of the family reunion, Perlman jumps 15 or 16 years ahead to examine the consequences of secrets not yet revealed in the earlier sections. It’s a literary gamble, wrenching readers out of the warm, albeit fractious, comfort of the Lipscomb home and dumping them squarely in the debris left behind by an unanticipated treachery. Still, Perlman’s character portrayals are so visceral and poignant, we are willing to be dislocated in order to catch up with the events of the intervening years and see what has become of everyone. By the end of the narrative, readers have information that has not yet been shared with the surviving characters, information that will further tear asunder what remains of the family structure. Does Perlman intend a future novel to catch us up once again? One can only hope.
Heartbreaking, occasionally humorous, and powerful, with an ending not really satisfying but certainly lingering.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: MidTown Publishing Inc.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2016
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
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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