A vast, cerebral account of an unstable teenager’s attempt to find redemption.
Jacoby’s (There Are Reasons Noah Packed No Clothes, 2012, etc.) literary prequel tells the story of young man’s journey to a friend’s wake, set over the course of an eventful evening.
It’s December 1981, and Richard Issych has been having a hard time. The 19-year-old lives with his overbearing parents and works the third shift at the Sekula Tool and Die foundry in Eastlake, Ohio; he takes five or six quaaludes per day. Maybe it’s the drugs, or maybe there’s a deeper cause—he has a history of suicide attempts—but Richard’s thoughts are often jumbled in a way that makes it difficult for him make decisions, or even keep track of what’s going on. When he arrives at work one night and learns that one of his co-workers, Dale Smith, has murdered fellow co-worker Melvin Skinner, whatever grip he had on reality gets that much looser—because Richard had picked up Dale and driven him to Melvin’s house, and along the way, Dale said that he intended to commit murder. Richard decides to attend Melvin’s wake, catching a ride with other co-workers Jeff, JoJo, and Dannyboy. The trip to the wake becomes a quixotic adventure across the rusty Cleveland metropolitan area, through Richard’s memories and into the depths of his own psyche. Throughout this novel, Jacoby’s prose, which closely follows Richard’s internal monologue, is dense and dynamic—often swerving off in unexpected directions before doubling back on itself: “He was a confusion of thoughts; he broke his brain in bits on needle thoughts, needless thoughts. He had to calm down, calm himself down, think, he told himself—think what you’re trying to think.” This makes for moments of wonderful lyricism, but it also slows the pace to a crawl at times—and, given the novel’s length of more than 450 pages, readers may find this somewhat discouraging. The book is conceptually impressive, however, and fans of epic postmodernist novels may find themselves enthralled by it.
A vast, cerebral account of an unstable teenager’s attempt to find redemption.Pub Date: May 15, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 371
Publisher: Cloud Books
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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