An often delightful tale that’s most exhilarating when its characters are at sea.
Youngsters from a New England island in 1950 track down stolen loot and confront a dangerous band of thieves in Hufstader’s debut YA adventure.
It’s the weekend before the new school year starts, and four friends have just enough time for a seafaring escapade. Fifteen-year-old Sara Selph has earned her parents’ permission to do so by honing her sailing skills all summer; she and her little brother, Miguel, and their pals, 15-year-old fraternal twins Jon and Abbie Cooper, plan to sail from their town on Great Whale Island to the smaller Sei Island. Their plans are interrupted by Miguel’s inadvertent discovery of a golden crucifix on their boat. They take the valuable item to police chief Tom Cooper, the twins’ father, rightly assuming that it belongs to a local family whose home was recently burgled. Miguel later deduces that the notorious crew of a boat called the Thresher could have pulled off the theft, despite its rock-solid alibi. The method entails braving a dangerous channel called the Graveyard, and the friends want to prove Miguel’s theory. They get closer to finding the rest of the stolen booty with assistance from a retired fisherman known as Cap’n Ben, but the search soon becomes a rescue. Hufstader displays his nautical expertise with numerous tense sequences set on the water. They entail a plethora of maritime jargon; some gets context in the story itself, and an extensive glossary at the end acts as a helpful guide to the rest: “Sara put the engine in neutral, cleated the tiller lines, and hurdled the thwarts on her way to the bow.” The characters are well-developed and distinctive, as Hufstader establishes that skipper Sara makes executive decisions (including one to traverse the Graveyard); Jon is shown to have romantic feelings for Sara; and 11-year-old Miguel is revealed as a resident troublemaker. At the same time, the author uses nerve-wracking recurring appearances of the bad guys’ boat to increase suspense.
An often delightful tale that’s most exhilarating when its characters are at sea.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Hedge Fence Press
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
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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