An odd, if oddly compelling, summarization of a forgotten writer’s works.
Schwartz (Maarten Maartens Rediscovered, 2015) offers a second volume summarizing the fiction of a Dutch author.
Though he has since faded from memory, Maartens was one of the most popular writers in English at the turn of the 20th century. This volume summarizes his detective novel, The Black-Box Murder (1889), as well as selections from his four volumes of short fiction: Some Women I Have Known (1901), My Poor Relations: Stories of Dutch Peasant Life (1905), The Woman’s Victory (1906), and Brothers All: My Stories of Dutch Peasant Life (1909). Using numerous quotes from the original text, Schwartz recounts Maarten’s tales of duchesses, doting mothers, clever daughters, dysfunctional families, wealthy elites, and country folks. Some of the shorter ones, such as “The Woman’s Victory,” which follows the comic dialogue of a recently married couple on an English train, appear unabridged, allowing the reader a glimpse at the unfiltered work of the writer. Another story presented in its entirety is “Lord Venetia,” a tale about a powerful banker that expresses a sentiment that may strike readers as prophetically contemporary: “He was a great banker. He was a great blackguard. It would not be necessary to say the same thing twice, but that the world is so slow to understand.” As with the previous volume, in which Schwartz gave the same treatment to Maartens’ novels, the reader may question the point of summarizing these stories in detail rather than reprinting them or critiquing them. Schwartz attempts to head off this question in his preface: “Why abridge short stories and not reprint them in full? The main rationale is that today’s readers might not be incentivized enough to read four volumes of short stories in their entirety by a ‘forgotten’ writer, but might read the stories in a condensed form.” As an unusually committed enterprise in reiteration, the reader cannot help but be drawn into the book, which forces (if perhaps inadvertently) a rumination on artistic intent and the nature of storytelling. Even so, one wishes that Schwartz would republish the original works, which would, despite his misgivings, almost certainly find a wider readership than these summaries.
An odd, if oddly compelling, summarization of a forgotten writer’s works.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Willow Manor Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2016
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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