An exasperating, caustic read that is difficult to swallow, despite its brevity.
The story of a dysfunctional suburban family, seen through the eyes of its most troubled members.
More anthropomorphized animals and midlife crises from journalist and critic Hawkins (A Year of Cats and Dogs, 2009, etc.) make for a weird and spiteful second novel. This odd multinarrator drama feels like a big fake-out from the beginning. The book opens with a confession from May, a newly landed immigrant adoptee from Peru, robbed of her native name of Esmeralda. The experience, it seems, has rendered her mute. After that jarring introduction, we meet April, May’s precocious sister, who is the center of her mother’s world. Their mother, Roxanne, is a hateful, hypocritical Stepford Wife aspirant who takes her considerable venom out on her husband. Craig, meanwhile, is a beta male with many regrets, who responds to his wife’s nagging to get a job by obsessively filling out contest entries. Though he genuinely loves his adopted daughter, his confessions are merely sad. “Later, years later, Roxanne accused me of staying for the kitchen. It was a low blow, though she was partly right,” he says. “The truth is I didn’t know where else to go.” This story of familial self-destruction is familiar, although Hawkins doses the book with truly bizarre perspectives that may intrigue more impulsive readers. The outsider’s perspective comes from Phoebe, the obese shut-in who lives next door and uses her creepy observations to chronicle the family’s destiny. The insider’s look comes from Mr. Cosmo, the family’s three-legged Weimaraner. “I don’t mean to sound self-absorbed although I know that’s how people think of me—flighty and selfish and handsome—but the stress in that household was almost unbearable by then,” the dog moans. Readers who get this far will be rewarded with a clichéd tragedy that may well inspire them to turn on any characters they’ve embraced.
An exasperating, caustic read that is difficult to swallow, despite its brevity.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-57962-204-6
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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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