Delightful fun with a surprisingly warm heart.
In this comic novel, a front-runner for gangsters leaves New York for Hollywood, where he becomes involved in filming a 1,000-year-old Japanese book.
Following the 1929 stock market crash, Jean-Yves LeFouet, the French-Canadian who narrates this engaging tale, figures it’s time to leave town: His boss, who was involved in a shady bunco scam, has just been thrown out of a high window by angry investors. Scamming isn’t Jean-Yves’ preference; “something of a drifter,” he’s fallen into jobs like rumrunning. “I love books and reading and the life of the mind and all that, but smuggling booze pays considerably better,” he says. So when he high-tails it for California, it’s not long before he gets a job running errands, caddying and chauffeuring for a small-time film producer. Englishman Charles Blaine Granyer (“Chilblain” to Cambridge pals) wants to adapt The Tale of Genji, written by Japanese noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu in the 11th century, into an erotic film. Jean-Yves juggles his job, his growing interest in a lovely haiku-writing bookseller and various underworld intrusions—including the return of “Big Department,” the quarter-ton, 6-foot-7-inch overlord of his New York days. Upton Sinclair, Louise Brooks and Fritz Lang all make appearances as well. Voorhees (The World’s Oldest Professions, 2013, etc.) has written what is very much a fun, champagne-fueled romp, but the book is well-grounded in realistic details and offers many thoughtful, witty observations from poetry-loving Jean-Yves. His experience with Wall Street leads him to some prescient conclusions: “[E]very last one of these guys is working some scheme….They call themselves investment bankers, traders, financial intermediaries, brokers, market makers. Unmakers is more like it.” Contemplating Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach,” Jean-Yves concludes that “the world is ignorant and violent but that we have one salvation before us, which is to hold tight the people we love and to be true to them.” A satisfying conclusion draws it all together.
Delightful fun with a surprisingly warm heart.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 231
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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