A fun, fleshed-out fantasy with sympathetic main characters.
A detective agency helps mutants created by radiation in this romantic fantasy thriller, the first in the Redclaw Origins series by Dean (Ghost of a Chance, 2018, etc.).
New York, 1955. Henrietta “Rhett” Bishop, a daughter of privilege whose father has gambled away the family fortune before taking his own life, must find a way to provide for herself. She takes a job at Redclaw Security, an unusual detective agency tasked with aiding the growing population of “shifters”—mutants created by radiation unleashed in the nuclear age. After Rhett proves her value to the firm during what she thought was an attempted robbery, her shifter boss sends her on a mission. Her target is Peter Knight, a nuclear scientist and widower whose wife died in a hit-and-run that looks like murder. He’s been blacklisted by the government for suspected Communist sympathies and has since dropped out of sight. Peter’s skills are highly desirable, however, and Rhett is sent to recruit him for Redclaw, though that’s not the only organization interested in him. She manages to locate Peter, and, with the promise that Redclaw will help him learn more about his wife’s death, she convinces him to join. Together they are sent after a stolen cache of artifacts hijacked en route to the Redclaw headquarters, artifacts that seem to have resurfaced in the Hamptons amid Rhett’s moneyed former crowd. Dean’s prose balances the urgency of romantic fantasy with the muscular rhythms of detective noir: “A quick glance at Knight showed he was losing his ability to maintain any part of his disguise. Even as I blanked on what to say to him, his face slowly morphed back into his own. I had no time to think it through. I just acted, grabbing Knight by the back of his neck and pulling him into a kiss, all the while fumbling behind me, clutch in hand, for the handle to the room beside us.” While the book relies heavily on archetypes, Dean does so with a winking self-awareness. Rhett and Peter are both well drawn and likable characters, and the blend of alien technology, shadowy organizations, hard-boiled sleuthing, and budding romance makes for a surprisingly compelling read.
A fun, fleshed-out fantasy with sympathetic main characters.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-69172-796-4
Page Count: 353
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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