A British screenwriter relocates to New England and becomes embroiled in small-town life in this novel.
Bill, a British writer, his wife, Catherine, and his son, Daniel, are living in France when opportunity comes knocking. Bill gets an offer to script an American TV series and double his current salary. He uproots his wife and son, installing them in a postwar timber house in the backwater town of Broadacre in New England, where he feels he will find all the tranquility he needs to focus on his craft. From his very arrival, the town appears to have other ideas. No sooner has the family stepped through the front door of its new home than it is disturbed by new neighbors coming by to introduce themselves and invite the clan to a party. Mary-Lou, the family discovers, is an overly flirtatious lawyer, and her husband Tom’s a broad-shouldered, lascivious builder. Soon Bill and Catherine find themselves caught in the unnecessary tangles of a small-town existence. They discover that there is a dispute regarding a shed built on their land. Their house is coveted. A property developer’s covert plan to build a working model village threatens the status quo. And what are all the mysterious goings on in the cemetery? And then come the murders. This book is intriguing, embellished by Crutchley’s (The Black Carriage, 2015) admirably quirky descriptive style: “The falling sun is painting the landscape as routinely as people go to church, as they dance in strange straight lines, obey their absurd speed limits, and as the weather is guaranteed to fall apart straight after Labor Day.” The charming work’s one flaw is that it takes on an ambitiously long list of characters, including crooks, state troopers, priests, and rabbis, which the author struggles to handle. It is not uncommon for a reader to have to backtrack to ascertain who is who and who does what. This is because Crutchley fails to draw sufficiently distinct portraits, to the extent that they become an anodyne blur. It is then necessary to reread passages to distinguish, among others, Tom the builder from Josh the “nose straightener.” But this minor confusion distracts little from an engaging and thoughtfully conceived plot. A family deals with a sleepy Northern town’s secrets in this enjoyably energetic romp.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 258
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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