Contrived storytelling outweighs the book’s scattered historical insights.
An aging musician revisits the love affair he had nearly 50 years earlier with the illustrious pianist Vladimir Horowitz.
Midnight in a Zurich cabaret, April 1986, and the piano player, Nico Kaufmann, gets an odd request: play Robert Schumann’s Träumerei. The three-minute miniature is an auditory madeleine for the customer, Reto Donati, a high-profile lawyer who earlier that day skipped out on his dubious appointment to be euthanized after a recording of the song triggered a poignant youthful memory. He has sought out the piano bar “to thank the piece” for saving his life. Träumerei also resonates with Kaufmann because of his association with Horowitz, for whom the piece was a cherished encore. This clavier coincidence is enough that the 70-year-old Kaufmann leaves with the 45-year-old Donati, who takes up residence in Kaufmann’s guest room. For the next two weeks, the duo tour in and around Zurich while Kaufmann relates how he, as a 21-year-old “gigolo,” met the 33-year-old Horowitz in 1937 and became his student and lover. The affair persisted more than two years—against the wishes of Kaufmann’s father, Horowitz’s wife, even Horowitz‘s own neuroses. Singer, the pen name of German cultural historian Eva Gesine Baur, had access to the real Kaufmann’s unpublished archives, including letters from Horowitz, which perhaps explains why her book never settles into either a conventional retelling of Kaufmann‘s life or the novel enticingly introduced in the first two chapters. Donati’s story is relegated to infrequent, often jarring, intrusions, mostly in the form of one-note expository characters, like his jilted, golf club–wielding fiancee; or facile verbal proddings, á la “What were you thinking that whole time?” This short shrift is a shame, because Donati’s tale of suppressed love, what little is dribbled out, seems much more fertile ground for compelling fiction.
Contrived storytelling outweighs the book’s scattered historical insights.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-939931-86-3
Page Count: 230
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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