Deft storytelling and a riptide of action propel this cataclysmic narrative along, regardless of its eco-religious ballast.
Young priest Joe Stanton is hunted by a vicious military-industrial conspiracy when he becomes the latest man afflicted by mystic—and very likely fatal—visions of strange marine environments and parental loss.
Bennett’s (Battle for Cascadia, 2011, etc.) sure hand keeps this apocalyptic yarn from sinking in outsized action and borderline-cartoonish characterizations. Joe Stanton is a handsome, compassionate yet two-fisted Episcopal priest with a girlfriend, Ella, who everyone agrees is stunningly gorgeous. Joe is suddenly seized by panicked visions of a deceased daughter he never had and overwhelming emotions of grief and loss. When amateur video of Stanton’s public meltdown goes viral, the incident draws the attention of Erebus, a rogue international military-security contractor (think Blackwater). Two of their divers suffered identical symptoms and died with what appeared to be brain tumors. Sheldon Beck, psychopath scion of the alpha-predator family that runs Erebus, wants to know the connection. Beck and his sadistic mercenaries, amoral doctors and ex–Special Forces killers have Joe and Ella under surveillance on the Washington state coastline, as the couple realizes Joe is telepathically linked to an astounding event unfolding in Earth’s oceans. Sci-fi fans may sense parallels with the comedic plotlines of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) or Douglas Adams’ So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984); this time, though, it’s played straight. Yet Bennett, after a neat Dean Koontz–style curtain-raiser, keeps raising the stakes. And, like a clever magician, he diverts the reader’s attention while taking the ecological-end-times scenario to the next level. The tone is consistent with much Christian-oriented fantasy fiction—the title apparently refers not only to the year this takes place, but also to a biblicalchapter and verse—and there are functional equivalents of a deity, the devil and a Christ-like sacrifice. But the emphasis is on environmentalism more so than evangelism. Indeed, except for the ever virtuous hero and heroine, Homo sapiens don’t seem to be deemed a species worth saving.
Deft storytelling and a riptide of action propel this cataclysmic narrative along, regardless of its eco-religious ballast.Pub Date: May 20, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Booktrope Seattle
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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