One of our significant writers of today has written a modern-styled novel that will demand attention whether the public finds it shocking, disturbing, moving, absorbing- or something of each. Be prepared for it to be difficult reading. The style is oddly diffuse, sometimes tortured, often oblique — and at times pictorial, vivid, dramatic. But the substance of the text strikes home. Here are people any one of us might know, people who might be our neighbors, our friends. And Cozzens has cut through the outer trappings to reveal the buried emotions, the mental contrivings, the rationalizations, the confusion that combine to make up the whole man. He has laid bare a community, on the surface a reasonably normal functioning Jersey (?) town. Here is a respectable and revered firm of lawyers, here a doctor, here the wives and mothers and children, the brothers and sisters, here the politicians and their cohorts, here the new minister and the young woman he will marry, here the practised girl on the make and the silly sentimentalist who gets "caught" — and here are the facts behind the facts of their multi-patterned lives. Three sparks light the fires:- a visiting city lawyer comes to investigate a somewhat tangled estate with conflicting demands of the heirs; a wastrel youth is brought to court by a town girl who accuses him of rape; a clergyman plans to request that the church endowment be transferred to a general diocesan fund for operation. Arthur Winner, junior member of the leading firm of lawyers, finds himself involved in all three cases, and as they bring new facts to light more and more people are implicated, and the reader fits the pieces together into a jigsaw puzzle of the townspeople and the principals in a complex two generation story, which holds one spellbound to the end. There are unforgettable scenes — characters that will live always — and no one person comes off unscathed. It's not a book to leave around for teenagers to pick up; there is much in it that will be compared to O'Hara and Ten And much that is as earthy, as bluntly outspoken as Clarison or Tom James. But it must not be dismissed — for here is a profoundly honest piece of America.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1957
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1957
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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