Strong prose, but this novel’s chief conceit falters.
A writer’s friendship with a mentally ill man sustains him through a painful crisis in this novel.
After a hard childhood marked by poverty, hard work, and his parents’ beatings, Stephen Christiansen, 28, has become a man of good fortune. Although he’s not yet 30, he’s already published three well-reviewed novels and works as an editor at Baltimore’s Bessemer Press, owned by his old friend Charlie Shultz. Stephen lives with Phoebe Walker, a nurse, to whom he’s been deeply devoted since he proposed marriage to her seven years ago. She never seems quite ready for a wedding, but she assures him that someday she will be. Nevertheless, Stephen keeps having disturbing, recurring nightmares about a woman on a grassy knoll who keeps fading away from him. One day, Stephen interrupts a street robbery, saves a man’s life, and gets shot himself. He becomes friends with the intended victim, Isaac Sellers, even though they’re very different; Stephen is white and affluent while Isaac describes himself as a “black, fiscally disenfranchised, schizophrenic—mentally ill—man living in America today.” Isaac is a fan of Stephen’s work and an aspiring writer, although he’s troubled by voices that order him to kill himself or his wife. Medication helps calm his symptoms but also makes Isaac, in his own words, “a drudge.” The two men begin a friendship that becomes invaluable to Stephen when his life turns upside-down. Isaac, despite his own struggles, continues to inspire Stephen as a writer and as a man. Dehmelt (The Hard Way Back to Heaven, 2015) displays a wonderful ear for dialogue in this novel, nicely capturing the easy banter between old friends or longtime lovers. He can turn a good phrase, too, as when the radiance drains from a woman’s face “as if she’s waking up the morning after a funeral.” Phoebe’s chief conflict—she can’t live up to Stephen’s fictionalized version of her, because no one could—serves the story and characters well. However, Isaac, despite his importance to the plot, is a weak creation; he sounds exactly like Stephen, possessing no original voice, and he’s also another example of the “magical minority” cliché—an outsider character of color whose sole function is to aid a white protagonist.
Strong prose, but this novel’s chief conceit falters.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 193
Publisher: Apprentice House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 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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