Far from a sanitized fable, this book delivers a highly nuanced and lurid account of one man’s surprisingly spiritual quest.
A debut novel chronicles a young Asian-American’s odyssey of frustration and redemption.
To say that David, the narrator of this story, is irked by a lot in life would be an understatement. Feeling as though “the Creator didn’t like me,” David details his coming-of-age in Los Angeles as he attempts to get rich, have sex, and otherwise attain the more tangible rewards in life. But those prizes, despite his best efforts, manage to remain out of reach. Beginning with his stalled pursuit of a girl named Jeannie Kim, who he winds up admitting “never considered me a real man,” David’s long story of embarrassment goes on to incorporate a number of adventures. From his time spent with a pyramid scheme to a stint in Mexico City, his experiences are varied, brutal, and not meant for the squeamish. A lover of movies and professional wrestling, David frequently embraces pop-culture references. When observing a fight at a nightclub in which he spends time as a struggling waiter, David sees a patron “doing the flying body press like Ricky ‘The Dragon’ Steamboat.” While such reflections may not be universally understood, they help to humanize the protagonist. David may be short, no friend to the environment (his pastor admonishes him as “the biggest litterbug I have ever seen!”), and downright pathetic, but he is, in the end, just as flawed as the rest of humanity. Though his thoughts delve deeply into the crude (“My schlong was like the Elven sword wielded by Frodo that turned blue whenever the Orcs were near,” he says of his penis), they are never outside the imagination of a man mystified and alienated by modern sexuality. Notable for informative tidbits (such as the concept of “booking” at Asian nightclubs), Oh’s tale also offers some episodes that drag. While much can be gleaned from David’s time as a nightclub waiter (including images of his business cards), readers may find their attentions wandering when the narrative turns to topics such as the markup price of whiskey. Though David’s eventual path to Christianity is long (and bumpy), the final pages of this vulgar, detailed, and amusing novel see a man who has come an extraordinary distance.
Far from a sanitized fable, this book delivers a highly nuanced and lurid account of one man’s surprisingly spiritual quest.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Tellwell Talent
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 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
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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