Imperfect but emotionally wrenching.
An anonymous valentine leads a middle-aged, happily married woman into a sexual labyrinth.
Sherry, an English professor at a community college in Michigan, and her software designer husband, Jon, are adjusting to being empty nesters when Sherry receives her first anonymous love note. Amused and flattered, she casually tells both her husband and her best friend Sue. As the notes continue, Sherry finds herself sexually awakened for the first time in years, and she begins masturbating to fantasies of her admirer. Meanwhile, Sherry runs into her son Chad’s childhood friend Garret, who is studying car mechanics. Although the boys have not been friends for years, Sherry, feeling guilty that Garret’s life holds so much less promise than Chad’s, invites Garret for supper during Chad’s spring break from Berkley. When the subject of Sherry’s love notes comes up during the awkward meal, Garret says that his teacher Bram, who has been singing Sherry’s praises in class, is probably her admirer. Sherry soon plunges into a torrid affair with Bram while Jon, titillated by the idea of Sherry taking a lover, not only allows but encourages their meetings. The only problem is that Bram didn’t write the letters and Jon has been assuming that Sherry’s description of her affair is a fiction she’s created to fire up their own sex life. In other hands, these misunderstandings could turn into dark hilarity, but Kasischke (The Life Before Her Eyes, 2001, etc.) aims toward tragedy, using delicate, elegant prose to expose the psychological and moral rot that can lie beneath the most normal façade. She gets right to the core, whether describing Sherry’s maternal sense of loss as her son pulls away from childhood or her suddenly awakened animal lust for both Bram and Jon. Unfortunately, Kasischke gives Chad, who remains only half realized, too much responsibility for a plot that falls apart at the end.
Imperfect but emotionally wrenching.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2007
ISBN: 0-15-101273-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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