An upbeat and thoughtful blend of romance and politics.
In Ford’s debut novel, an unwed woman has her sights set on political office and searches for a powerful partner to help get her there.
Soon after U.S. Rep. White (R-Florida) secures another term, he taps his campaign manager, Megan Thompson, to be his 2018 successor, and he offers her a job as his aide in Washington, D.C., in charge of energy and environmental legislation. However, the fact that she’s a single woman—she recently called off a wedding when she discovered that her fiance cheated on her with her best friend—could be off-putting to voters, especially social conservatives. So White arranges for Megan to go on a dating tour to find a “strategic power match,” though she largely finds disappointment instead. Eventually, though, she meets Brock Tolbert, a spokesman for the National Rifle Association who’s charming, well-connected, and handsome—politically perfect. Meanwhile, she sees her new roommate, Andrew Croswell, as the bane of her existence; she thinks that he’s a smug, opinionated, “liberal libido killer.” He works for a group that’s lobbying for a more robust approach to climate change. Although his and Megan’s relationship begins in mutual acrimony, their enmity soon eases into friendly détente and then sweetly flirts with something deeper—and less platonic. Author Ford pulls off an impressive trick, artfully combining two seemingly incongruent genres in a companionably lighthearted romance and an astute political commentary on transcending partisanship. The author has a refreshing talent for humanizing ideological conflict, and both Megan and Andrew turn out to be far more complex than their political leanings would suggest. The plot occasionally loses its steam and slows to a meandering stroll, and the novel as whole would benefit from a shorter page count. Also, Andrew is initially presented as so insufferably shrill, that it isn’t easy for Ford, or the reader, to get rid of that first impression. However, this is a subtly ambitious work that doesn’t shy away from contentious subjects, such as same-sex marriage and climate change, and it squarely confronts the most controversial topic of the day—the presidency of Donald Trump.
An upbeat and thoughtful blend of romance and politics.Pub Date: July 15, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 448
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 20, 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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