A compassionate but excessively slow cancer story.
Mills’ (The Parts That Followed, 2014, etc.) third novel uses four interweaving narratives to tell the story of mysterious medical malpractice at Kendal Slate Memorial Hospital.
Dale Reichter’s beloved wife, Cindy, suddenly develops an aggressive form of cancer after a routine hysterectomy at Kendal Slate. She dies within months of the surgery, leaving Dale devastated and suspicious of the hospital staff. Meanwhile, Emma Speck suffers from a fibroid that doctors insist is benign, but she also undergoes a straightforward hysterectomy when the fibroid becomes painful, only to develop cancerous symptoms similar to Cindy’s that she and her husband, Russell, must face together. Addison and Keith have been trying to start a family, but after multiple miscarriages, a life-threatening pregnancy, and an endometriosis diagnosis, Addison plans to have a hysterectomy that will stop her pain, even though it will also end her ability to conceive. At the same time, Dr. Richard Oakley, the chair of the surgical department at Kendal Slate, handles complaints from his patients with little sensitivity while ignoring his own mounting problems at home. All parties individually begin to investigate these routine surgeries gone horribly wrong and discover that the cancer is the result of a common surgical technique called morcellation, which breaks up growths into small pieces, which then develop into aggressive leiomyosarcoma tumors. All four lives intertwine as they find common ground in their personal battles against this alarming discovery. Mills offers an empathetic and engaging medical novel that’s deeply rooted in its characters and their experiences, illustrating the ways in which cancer can break apart but also unite families. Its focus on women, and women’s health in particular, is a crucial centerpiece. In Richard, the author successfully develops a jaded and despicable villain, counterbalancing him with the loving personae of Dale, Emma, and Addison. However, the novel could be perhaps 100 pages shorter, as all four storylines feel unnecessarily long. The lengthy individual narratives often cause the plot to lack forward movement for chapters at a time, creating an overall effect of drawn-out tedium.
A compassionate but excessively slow cancer story.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Universal Mysteries
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2018
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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