An excellent read, especially for those who love cooking, romance, and realistically poignant LGBT themes.
In Bailey’s debut novel, a blossoming relationship between a gay man and his allegedly straight neighbor begins through the art of cooking.
Pierre Jackson moves to Toronto from Detroit to be with his wealthy news anchor fiance, Dre. But after they have a dramatic fight, Pierre spends some time living on his own and enrolls in a French cooking class. His messy apron quickly catches the eye of his new neighbor, Vijay Khakwani, who invites him to come to his apartment every Thursday night to teach him how to cook. Pierre is instantly attracted, but due to Vijay’s swaggering, “straight-boy” persona, he tries to subdue his emotions as they develop a strong friendship. Vijay has his own problems, particularly with his overbearing, high-powered lawyer mother, who wants him to follow through on an arranged marriage to a woman. He tries to channel his frustration into meditation and studying the teachings of Buddhism, but he soon becomes overwhelmed with confusion about his true feelings for Pierre. The plot becomes increasingly absorbing when Dre reappears in Pierre’s life in an attempt to repair their relationship; meanwhile, Vijay tries desperately to suppress his attraction to men during a complicated identity crisis. Bailey’s novel is smart, captivating, and hilarious, seasoned with spicy moments of intimacy, hip and witty dialogue, and a hefty serving of drama. It tackles a wide range of subjects, including difficult-to-navigate gray areas of LGBT relationships, Buddhist philosophy, cultural identity, and the subtle yet prevailing homophobic tendencies of a supposedly welcoming modern society. The author beautifully melds the art of cooking with rising romantic desire and also examines engaging cultural dynamics as Pierre, an African-American man from Detroit, teaches Vijay, an Indo-Guyanese man who’s fairly far-removed from his cultural heritage, how to cook and enjoy traditional Indian cuisine. Also, although Pierre and Dre move to Toronto in order to be legally married, Dre still harbors anxieties about his family’s homophobia, and he worries that he’ll be treated differently at his workplace as an openly gay man. Although the novel’s ending is a surprise, readers won’t be disappointed.
An excellent read, especially for those who love cooking, romance, and realistically poignant LGBT themes.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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