A layered and insightful exploration of how people seek meaning in careers and relationships.
A middle-aged woman considers what constitutes infidelity in this debut novel.
As an award-winning photojournalist, Alex used to travel to war-torn parts of the globe to capture scenes of suffering, hoping to awaken the American public to problems that their government helped create. Now, she’s a 43-year-old mother of two who photographs family portraits in her Westchester, New York, studio. Her lawyer husband, Martin, tells people that she left her previous job because she decided “It was time for something new”; Berks, her fellow photojournalist and former lover, accuses her of selling out in exchange for stultifying suburban bliss. Alex knows that neither description tells the whole story, but she isn’t quite sure how to frame her own life. She doesn’t miss the danger of her past work, but she does miss its exhilaration and sense of purpose. When her glamorous older sister, Maggie, casually mentions that their late father had an affair and that she herself is sleeping with a married man, Alex feels something spark inside her. She resolves to capture the essence of extramarital affairs in photos, starting by taking covert pictures of Maggie and her boyfriend. But the project forces her to confront her motives as a photographer; maybe her new obsession with “cheating,” she thinks, is a function of her compulsion to “chas[e] after other people’s sadness.” A lesser novelist would draw clearer lines between career and motherhood, history and loyalty, desire and morality. Author Amon, however, effortlessly balances such seemingly conflicting truths. She shows how the topic of infidelity shadows Alex’s own marriage as well as her protagonist’s interactions with her siblings and mother. Each conversation carries rich undertones of unspoken emotional baggage; the scenes with Berks are particularly loaded, featuring frustration, romance, comfort, jealousy, and admiration within the span of a few paragraphs. Amon, in clean, polished prose, poses messy questions: How do you enjoy your version of happiness in a world full of misery? And how do you appreciate a person’s love for you when you see that his or her love for someone else is greater?
A layered and insightful exploration of how people seek meaning in careers and relationships.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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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