Slow but lovingly crafted and complex; a nightstand book for lovers of Wuthering Heights and Bleak House.
The execution of an architect’s will reveals complex relationships in Rosen’s debut novel.
This narrative summons Samuel Grafton-Hall, fictional famed architect of the 20th century, and the relationships he had with numerous women throughout his life. Rosen focuses on each of the important women who surrounded him, including his first wife, Catherine Chardon, whose architectural passions Grafton-Hall repeatedly stifled, and Daphne Paull, aka Camilla Iduna, a “nymphet” whom he kept at his second home, Hesperus’ Walk—a massive, gothic eyesore that Grafton-Hall built out of spite for former client Von Mark (who then deeded the property to Grafton-Hall in an act of revenge). The Walk becomes the site of the novel’s greatest dramas: a strange codicil to Grafton-Hall’s will requires his widow and second wife, Elizabeth, who currently resides at the rustic but sumptuous Upana Rose, to go to the Walk to claim stewardship of it from its current occupant (whomever that might be). It’s through this entry point that readers learn of a fire there that claimed Catherine’s life; the Walk also played a role in Grafton-Hall’s attempts to keep his young mistress hidden: might the fire have been more than mere accident? The drama unfolds amid passages brimming with vivid descriptions—crucial in a novel on architecture: “The structure seemed to hug the land in its endless arms, as its horizontal lines and the breadth of the field formed a picture plane that conspired to produce an elusive vanishing point.” If only the inner landscapes were so eloquently sculpted; passages of self-reflection feature awkward rhetorical questions and often tell readers what a character feels before they have a chance to witness it. Still, effortless dialogue helps make the characters feel more complete. If readers continue through the only-hinted-at tension within the sluggish early chapters, they’ll find more intense drama in the latter half.
Slow but lovingly crafted and complex; a nightstand book for lovers of Wuthering Heights and Bleak House.Pub Date: April 11, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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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