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THE HOP

Like Clarke’s debut, this is technically adventurous, politically relevant, and emotionally engaging.

The author of Thin Girls (2020) turns from disordered eating to sex work in her second novel.

The novel opens with a Vogue features editor gushing about Lady Lane—about her hair, her skin, the way she moves—and complaining about the fact that Lady refuses to share any information at all about her past. She ends with the line: “There’s talk of a multimillion-dollar book deal on the table for Lady Lane’s biography, but no one can get her to agree to tell the whole story.” In the next line, Lady herself takes over the narration. Her first words are, “I’ll start from the beginning.” The tension between one sentence and the next is amusing, but it also hints at what’s to come. This is the “whole story.” It’s the story Lady chooses to tell about herself. But it’s also the stories that other people tell about her—and the fact that these stories are valuable currency is an inevitable product of her celebrity. Lady describes an impoverished childhood in New Zealand, the death of her loving but unreliable mother, and her decision to move to the United States to work as a Bunny in a legal brothel in Nevada. She recounts childhood crushes and how she began charging money for kisses as a girl. And she offers a look inside the sex industry. But there are other voices here, too, co-workers, friends, and other people who know her. Their stories add texture to Lady’s account, and they often contradict her memory of events or her sense of herself. The plot turns on her realization that, although she made the choice to work at The Hop, the brothel’s owner regards her as a commodity, essentially interchangeable with the woman she replaces. The choice to work for him is a one-time exchange; making this choice means giving him license to choose how he uses her. Liberating herself—and her fellow Bunnies—will require a full-scale revolution. Although the narrative ends with some of the trappings of a conventional happily-ever-after, they are hard-won, and Clarke refuses to turn this story into a morality play. Newly rich and famous, Lady doesn’t turn away from sex work. Instead, she uses her new freedom to imagine what sex work might look like if its practitioners were truly empowered and autonomous.

Like Clarke’s debut, this is technically adventurous, politically relevant, and emotionally engaging.

Pub Date: June 7, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-06-308-909-9

Page Count: 528

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022

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DEVOLUTION

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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

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WARD D

A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.

A medical student is assigned an overnight shift to observe a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric ward and help with emergencies. You’d never guess what happens next.

Amy Brenner isn’t even interested in psychiatry, the one medical specialty she’s never considered for her own career. Nor is she interested any more in Cameron Berger, the classmate who ended their relationship so that he could spend more time studying, and she’s not pleased to learn that he’s switched his rotation with another student so he can spend some of the next 13 hours persuading Amy to rekindle their romance. Predictably, Cam will be the least of Amy’s troubles. Apart from Dr. Richard Beck and nurse Ramona Dutton, everyone else on Ward D is much more dangerous, from elderly Mary Cummings, whose knitting needles aren’t plastic but sharpened steel, to William Schoenfeld, who’s stopped taking the medications that were supposed to silence the voices telling him to kill people, to Damon Sawyer, who’s confined in Seclusion One and can’t possibly escape, unless a power outage neutralizes the locks. Most threatening of all is Jade Carpenter, whose close friendship with Amy ended eight years ago when Amy turned her in for what ended up being only one of a whole series of thrill crimes. McFadden measures out the complications, revelations, and betrayals with such an expert hand that readers anxiously trying to figure out whom Amy can trust as her goal shifts from ticking off a toilsome requirement to surviving the night may well end up wondering whom they can trust themselves. And isn’t provoking that kind of paranoia what medical thrillers are all about?

A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.

Pub Date: March 4, 2025

ISBN: 9781464227271

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Poisoned Pen

Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025

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