Two thumbs up for action, suspense, and lust.
The opening of a major film festival goes off script when the CEO’s former husband and his half brother—her current lover—go missing.
In Walsh’s suspenseful debut about the politics, pressure, and glamour behind the scenes of an international film fest, Jane Browning pole-vaults from artistic director to acting CEO of a famous Canadian Film Festival after allegations of sexual wrongdoing sideline the organization’s head. Problems plague the festival: A sponsoring Asian country wants veto power over the screening of a documentary critical of its government, and a hotel maid accuses a famed director of assault, landing him in jail instead of on the red carpet. Jane’s partner of seven years, Bob Walker-Smythe, doesn’t show on the festival’s opening night, and he fails to answer his cell. The previous month, Bob’s half brother Johnnie, who’s Jane’s ex, went AWOL. After Johnnie and Jane had called it quits, she hooked up with Bob (the “sexual tension was exquisite”), and the three of them are now business partners in Smythe Financial, a midsize firm. Her festival a madhouse and her lover missing, Jane’s life is complicated further when the Ontario Securities Commission announces there’s major money missing from Smythe Financial. Tension becomes palpable when Jane realizes someone is stalking her. The title of this taut, thrilling literary novel, written by a former film producer, refers to a camera technique in which the focus adjusts from one character to another. Similarly, the reader’s focus changes from one of Jane’s worsening problems to another. She imagines her varying situations as a filmmaker would. For example, after typing an address into her phone’s GPS, she follows the route on the screen, “watching the journey as a director might: a long establishing shot of a city neighborhood, circuitous jungle of one-way streets, dead ends, and glass towers.” There are rich descriptions throughout; for example, a woman “vibrated with triumph,” and a man’s flesh was as cold as imagined, “although also sweaty, which was an unwelcome surprise.”
Two thumbs up for action, suspense, and lust.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1770415799
Page Count: 272
Publisher: ECW Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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