by Helen Dunmore ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2017
Middling Dunmore, but middling Dunmore is still damn fine. Her death at 64 is a real loss.
Published posthumously, the final novel from prolific and genre-hopping Dunmore (Exposure, 2016, etc.) explores the impact of the French Revolution on 1790s England within the context of a gothic romance set in Bristol, where the author herself lived and wrote.
Newly married 22-year-old Lizzie narrates the evolution of her marriage to builder John Diner Tredevant, a relationship both passionate and troubled. While Diner is a businessman, Lizzie was raised by her widowed Mammie, who writes radical political treatises promoting human rights and whose second husband counts Tom Paine as a friend. Lizzie married in defiance of Mammie, who voiced reservations about Lizzie’s marriage to 36-year-old Diner because he was a widower as well as a businessman. As the novel opens, Lizzie, deeply in love, fears she is living in the shadow of Diner’s first wife, Lucy, who died while visiting her native France—echoes of Daphne du Maurier and Charlotte Brontë—but soon enough Diner’s jealous possessiveness becomes a bigger concern, as do the Tredevants’ finances. Diner is heavily invested in developing a terrace of grand houses overlooking the River Avon. While Bristol has been in a building boom, Diner’s business ambitions falter in England’s newly uncertain political climate when Louis XVI is dethroned, threatening the concept of monarchy but also introducing the specter of mob rule and the possibility of war between France and England. (Needless to say, Diner’s and Mammie’s views differ on the development.) When 39-year-old Mammie dies unexpectedly, Lizzie cajoles a reluctant Diner to let her care for her infant half brother, Thomas, in their home. Since Diner wants all Lizzie’s attention for himself, tensions increase. Then there are her new suspicions about his cloudy past and her growing if unspoken attraction to a young poet. Yet Lizzie remains emotionally entwined with the magnificently complex villain Diner.
Middling Dunmore, but middling Dunmore is still damn fine. Her death at 64 is a real loss.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2714-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
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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by Alex Michaelides ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 2019
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
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New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
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
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