Heart-wrenching, heartwarming, charming, but most of all fun—a meeting of the most complex of relationships, plagued by the...
Returning home for a holiday, a young woman faces stirring parallels between her difficulties with her polyamorous girlfriend and memories of growing up with her liberal Episcopalian priest mother.
In this debut novella, Sarah seems the stereotypical Stanford graduate student, a hippie from the Midwest who’s turned her issues with her mother, Alex, into the study of psychology. Reluctantly traveling to Iowa from California for Easter, she is dropped back into thorny family dynamics. The demands on her mother’s time as leader of her flock and caretaker of the community leave Sarah at best resentful of not having all of her affection and, at worst, becoming a project, another problem in the priest’s congregation to be addressed. Compounding matters is the other Alex now in Sarah’s circle, a vibrant punk-rock pillar of gender-queerness, whose commitment to polyamory has left the psych student with one more woman in her life whose love she must share. When her girlfriend surprises her by joining her for the break, Sarah’s wish to avoid introducing the two Alexes who cause her startlingly similar complications means the reopening of old wounds as well as solutions that won’t necessarily close them. The strength of Kaye’s novella—and in one instance, its weakness—is its thrift. Sarah’s first-person narration employs a self-aware but welcoming style, utilizing natural digressions to fill in the gaps of her childhood and her burgeoning relationship with her new girlfriend. These asides are never tedious; they are the ideal detours that never overstay their welcome. Their lone failing is in adequately fleshing out Sarah’s love interest—she is charismatic and cool but as rich and heartbreaking as her back story of being ejected by her Seventh-day Adventist family. Unfortunately, readers find out too little about the polyamorous life Alex leads that troubles Sarah. But the dialogue is well-tuned; even when Sarah’s psych student insights seem a little too analytical, this awkwardness fits. The Rev. Alex is a resonant character, the liberal yet devout priest giving so much to her community that many readers will come away wanting further stories about her.
Heart-wrenching, heartwarming, charming, but most of all fun—a meeting of the most complex of relationships, plagued by the same aches.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 75
Publisher: WBC Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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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