The climactic pages are as harrowing as anything in contemporary fiction, but you won’t want to miss a word leading up to...
The history of a destroyed family and the mingled guilt and rage that possess the survivor who remembers, and reimagines, their story—all rendered with hallucinatory clarity in this first English translation of yet another popular and critically acclaimed Dutch author.
“You have to harden yourself, for always,” Ellen Van Bemmel assures herself, long after the incident that took the lives of her parents and three siblings, leaving preadolescent Ellen and her younger brother Michael (nicknamed “Carlos”) to years of therapy, institutionalized care and foster families, and unending trauma. In a fragmented narrative that leaps forward and backward in time, Dorrestein creates vivid extended scenes showing the Van Bemmels as a closely knit group of busy overachievers (overseen by Frits and Margje, who operate from their home an American news clipping service, and act like lovestruck newlyweds even after producing five children). The family seems, nevertheless, vulnerable to outrageous bad luck. Carlos’s painful accident and the birth of a malformed daughter who’ll require constant care are the initial cracks in a breakdown that reduces Margje to paranoid delusions and pulls her compliant husband into the act Ellen can never forgive (“You sacrificed us to your blind love for a sick, deranged woman”). Dorrestein keeps us guessing by concentrating on her narrator’s kaleidoscopic mood swings and bouts with alcoholism, promiscuity and consequent pregnancy, a marriage that it seems she wills to fail, an interrupted medical career, and a conflicted return to the house where the ghosts of her loved ones await and all their demons lurk. And, juxtaposed against this turbulence, Dorrestein returns us again and again to the ironic Edenic vision of a loving home filled with brilliant and beautiful people who, we realize with mounting horror, are fated to become their own furies and avengers.
The climactic pages are as harrowing as anything in contemporary fiction, but you won’t want to miss a word leading up to them. A triumph.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89558-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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