Deft characterization, wry humor and quiet but momentous scenes of growing affection create a deep-down satisfying novel.
Three people—a struggling artist, an unsuccessful writer and an elderly farmer—find an unexpected connection in this warmhearted novel.
“Am I the only person on the planet who wants some MAGIC in her life?” wonders Caddy Keyhoe, who sells “earnest footwear” in New Orleans while trying to make it as an artist. She creates collages from discarded shiny materials (“broken mirrors and costume jewelry, colored glass, bicycle reflectors”) that she layers and covers with acrylic. “The point is to look down deep into things,” she writes in an artist’s statement. Alec Rix, with one published novel to his credit, runs a failing bookstore in Columbia, S.C., and writes a little-read blog, along with the occasional freelanced article. Both are nearly 40, feeling frustrated in their work and personal lives. That changes when Caddy dreams of a diamond-shaped UFO and then finds a diamond, “glittering at her feet like a fallen star,” as if just for her. Her art freshly inspired, she contacts Alec after reading his article about a possible UFO sighting over the land of 85-year-old retired farmer Hatchell T. Beckham. When Alec meets Caddy and tells her of a surprising connection between her and Hatch, all their lives are transformed. The magic here isn’t really UFOs but rather the kind that allows the right people to find each other. Harper (Ghost in the Bedroom, 2014, etc.) capably creates fully rounded portraits of her believable, scarred, sometimes-insecure, entirely lovable characters. Hatch, thinking of all he has survived, sometimes kneels and prays when no one can see him: “Humble. Not only out of restrained Presbyterianism, but also because no man making his living by planting seeds in the earth can ever be anything but.” Minor characters also come alive; Caddy’s shoe-store boss and his girlfriend “believe in taking no more from the Earth than what’s strictly necessary: iPhones, mountain bikes, all-natural raw chicken from Whole Foods for their hypothyroid border collie.” The romantic plot is sweet, hot and well-paced.
Deft characterization, wry humor and quiet but momentous scenes of growing affection create a deep-down satisfying novel.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 259
Publisher: booksBnimble
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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