A beguiling, unexpected blend of whimsical romance and suspenseful noir.
Publisher, umbrella connoisseur, and accidental film-club member Olli Souminen fears he may be having a midlife crisis. It’s actually much worse: He’s being pulled into an alternate storyline in which he plays the cinematic hero.
Like Walter Mitty, Olli drifts into daydreams riddled with mermaids, voluptuous umbrella saleswomen, and his long-lost love, Greta. Bored with his wife, Aino, and their son, Lauri, Olli accidentally reconnects over Facebook with Greta, who has become a bestselling author. Her book, A Guide to the Cinematic Life, has inspired countless readers to remake themselves in the images of Veronica Lake, Grace Kelly, and other glamorous artists. Hoping to buttress his foundering publishing house, Olli pursues Greta, gaining not only a contract for her next book—the first in a series of magical travel guides—but also a shot at rekindling their romance. Yet events spiral quickly out of control as Olli’s wife and son disappear, kidnapped by the Blomroos siblings, Olli’s erstwhile childhood friends: Anne, Leo, and Riku. Every summer, Olli had palled around with the Blomrooses and their cousin, Karri, seeking secret tunnels throughout Finland’s countryside. Only Karri could ever find the tunnels, yet they all wriggled their way through the claustrophobic wormholes, no one remembering the strange happenings underground. Thirty years after Karri disappeared and a terrible summer morning splintered their friendship, the Blomrooses have returned, whisking Olli’s wife and son offstage, determined to orchestrate the final scenes of Olli and Greta’s great love affair. Finnish novelist Jääskeläinen (The Rabbit Back Literature Society, 2015) deftly channels the tropes of the big screen—from saturated colors and chiaroscuro to stolen lines and melodramatic scenes, he stages the glittering affair doomed by the secrets of that fateful summer, the mystery of Karri’s disappearance, and the truth about what happened in the secret tunnels.
A beguiling, unexpected blend of whimsical romance and suspenseful noir.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78227-337-0
Page Count: 418
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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