Quietly incisive.
Two fugitives, decades apart in age, come to terms with their deepest regrets in Stewart’s meditative fifth novel (The History of Us, 2013, etc.).
High on a mountain in Sewanee, Tennessee, in what is known as the Domain, two women have moved into small cottages overlooking a pond. Each has come seeking isolation and is at first annoyed to notice she's not the only pondside occupant. Margaret, 90, intends to live out her days with only her World War II scrapbook, her parents’ furniture, and her memories as companions. Jennifer, accompanied by her small son, Milo, rents the cabin across the pond from Margaret. Alternating between the first-person narration of Margaret and Jennifer’s third-person voice, Stewart establishes that each woman harbors a secret: each feels responsible for the death of her soul mate. In Margaret’s case, this is Kay, a fellow nurse with whom she served as Allied forces slogged across Western Europe after D-Day. Jennifer has left her small town and gone into a form of hiding after the death of her husband, Tommy, the love of her life but a hopeless drunk. (The exact nature of Jennifer’s guilt about Tommy is withheld until roughly halfway through the book.) Gradually, the grip of the past loosens as each woman reaches out with trepidation toward the world of the present. Though deficient in self-understanding, Jennifer, a massage therapist, is able to instantly diagnose the emotional states locked in the muscles of her clients, including Margaret. Margaret enlists Jennifer to help her record her memories of World War II and of Kay. Jennifer reluctantly enrolls Milo in preschool and is drawn into a small group of parents, including Megan and Sebastian, whose conflicted but functional marriage stands in grim contrast to Jennifer’s own. The arrival, late in the novel, of Zoe, Jennifer’s estranged teenage daughter, offers the possibility of a neat, sentimental resolution, which Stewart wisely avoids. Stewart’s prose is remarkable for its well-shaped sentences and nonshowy but sharp observations.
Quietly incisive.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0351-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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