An elusive but enchanting work by one of America’s greatest authors.
Beloved by some, maligned by others, Williams’ (The Visiting Privilege, 2015, etc.) second novel, first published in 1978, has a new 40th-anniversary edition.
We meet Pearl and her infant son, Sam, in a Florida bar. Pearl is drinking gin and tonics and having thoughts like this: “You cannot keep things the way they are. They go away. They change. There has never been an exception to this rule. No mercy has ever been shown.” She's running from her husband, Walker, on whose family’s private Northeastern island she has spent the previous year. She’s running because she does not want Sam raised under the influence of Walker’s brother, Thomas, a sinister “man of the world” who raises children (“a dozen…more or less”—none biologically his) “according to his interests.” Pearl, however, wants Sam “to be a simple child, her child. Not like the others...” who seem “like deadly little flowers to Pearl, budding Satans, quoting Dante before they lost their baby teeth.” But, drinking in the bar in Florida, Pearl knows that “Walker would find her.” She is correct. After Walker’s “caress [pushes] her halfway across the room,” they board a flight back north. But, in a classic Williams turn, the plane crashes into the Everglades, Walker is killed, and Pearl returns to the family's island with a child who may be Sam but may be some other, less-loving child—one infant exchanged for another in the aftermath of the crash. What follows is part fable and part drunken nightmare. (Indeed, the novel seems to intentionally defy categorization; one can never be sure that the register with which you’re reading is the register with which the book wants to be read.) It is a loose and uneasy tale of violence, innocence, childhood, motherhood, alcoholism, grief, origins, endings, comedy, murder, metamorphoses, and God. If that sounds like a lot, it is; but when a writer works with sentences like these, she can do what she wants: “Her feeling…was curved as a ball, a belly, a noose. There was no beginning to it. No end. Come unbidden. Part pain. Part comfort. That was love….To love was only to understand death.”
An elusive but enchanting work by one of America’s greatest authors.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-941040-89-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.
A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children.
Linus Baker loves rules, which makes him perfectly suited for his job as a midlevel bureaucrat working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, where he investigates orphanages for children who can do things like make objects float, who have tails or feathers, and even those who are young witches. Linus clings to the notion that his job is about saving children from cruel or dangerous homes, but really he’s a cog in a government machine that treats magical children as second-class citizens. When Extremely Upper Management sends for Linus, he learns that his next assignment is a mission to an island orphanage for especially dangerous kids. He is to stay on the island for a month and write reports for Extremely Upper Management, which warns him to be especially meticulous in his observations. When he reaches the island, he meets extraordinary kids like Talia the gnome, Theodore the wyvern, and Chauncey, an amorphous blob whose parentage is unknown. The proprietor of the orphanage is a strange but charming man named Arthur, who makes it clear to Linus that he will do anything in his power to give his charges a loving home on the island. As Linus spends more time with Arthur and the kids, he starts to question a world that would shun them for being different, and he even develops romantic feelings for Arthur. Lambda Literary Award–winning author Klune (The Art of Breathing, 2019, etc.) has a knack for creating endearing characters, and readers will grow to love Arthur and the orphans alongside Linus. Linus himself is a lovable protagonist despite his prickliness, and Klune aptly handles his evolving feelings and morals. The prose is a touch wooden in places, but fans of quirky fantasy will eat it up.
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21728-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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