What makes a mother unfit to raise her own child? That's the surface issue in this often engrossing first novel. Accessibly and attractively told in an easy confessional style, Miller's very current conundrum examines the baggage of guilt one can carry into sex and motherhood. Anna Dunlap, who narrates, is a conscientious divorcee feeling her way toward an independent new life for herself and three-year-old Molly. The scene is Boston, where Anna is just settling in—piano pupils, part-time laboratory job, day-care for Molly—when she becomes involved with Leo Cutter, a loose-hanging artist who lives in a loft and doesn't own a suit. Experiencing sexual fulfillment for the first time, Anna's commitment to life with Leo is total (at his insistence she has an abortion). And she sees no obstacle to bringing Leo into her life with Molly—a home life that includes casual nudity, showers together and Molly's occasional hops into bed with Mom. . .and Leo, who seems to be getting all of mother's attention. Then, Anna's former husband, remarried and properly middle-class, learns from Molly that she has physical contact with Leo that seems to go beyond permissible boundaries. The case goes to court, and Anna sees her life picked apart by others. Throughout, Anna remembers some early family relationships, underlining repression and distance, and her failure to achieve distinction as a pianist—a failure that propelled her into adolescent sex and its "Nauseous sense of falseness in myself." With Leo, there's a "boundless Eden." But after the custody battle, Anna drives Leo away with "an irrational hatred," and—embarked on a tentative and solitary life—she will, for moments of pleasure, return to the piano: "Other instruments require a kind of connection and exposure I am incapable of." A Kramer vs. Kramer custody fight; a most convincing tot; and an appealing confidential style that points up some matters of current controversy (what are the legal and societal boundaries of child abuse?): a potential winner.
Pub Date: May 1, 1986
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1986
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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